


Revenge (best served screaming)

by FlamingoQueen



Series: Losers in Love [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Venom (Movie 2018)
Genre: (also not of animals), (not of animals), A.I.M., Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Canon-Typical Cannibalism, Canon-Typical Violence, Copious use of trope names, End notes specifically, Gender-Neutral Pronouns for Venom Symbiote (Marvel), Gender-Neutral Venom Symbiote (Marvel), Happy Ending, Hydra (Marvel), One of these chapters is called Wump okay?, Other, POV Alternating, Probably too copious, Rabbits, Spiders, Torture, Vivisection, Winter Soldier Bucky Barnes, lab animals
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-02
Updated: 2020-12-09
Packaged: 2021-03-06 19:40:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 15
Words: 47,702
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26254306
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FlamingoQueen/pseuds/FlamingoQueen
Summary: So it was a bad idea to hitch a ride on that particular comet hurtling toward this particular planet with its particularly inhospitable atmosphere of literal hellfire. So sue them. No one handed Venom a map or anything when they said “go forth and conquer.”So he was briefed with a map and a mission to gut a lab full of researchers poking sticks at something the handlers want in on. That doesn’t make this his fault. Does make it his problem, though, that no one told the Winter Soldier to watch out for possessed rabbits.(Or: Winter Soldier, meet Venom, your new extraterrestrial life partner. Enjoy that, pal.)
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Venom Symbiote
Series: Losers in Love [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1907353
Comments: 224
Kudos: 148





	1. Plot Bunny

**Author's Note:**

> This story is completely written and will be touched up and posted one chapter a week, on Wednesdays. Content warnings are at the end of each chapter, and if you ever need more info, please ask me on [Tumblr (FlamingoQueenWrites)](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/view/flamingo-queen-writes) and I'll fill you in. ^_^

######  **SOLDIER:**

**— Island research facility in Lake Kemijärvi, Finland: Before dawn, 15 June 1968 —**

He hasn’t felt the handler’s eyes on his back for exactly forty-two minutes and five seconds when the canoe _shshes_ its way into the reeds on the northeastern side of the island. Forty-two minutes and _six_ seconds ago, there’d been a bend in all this greenery, a little spit of trees that broke line of sight, and then— Freedom.

Freedom to do his damn job without supervision or criticism.

The Soldier slips from the canoe without a splash—because he’s got some pride left, that’s why—and hauls it up the overgrown shoreline a few feet. Stakes it down, too, just in case. Probably hell to pay if he loses the damn boat on this mission.

Then it’s infiltration time. His very favorite part. 

Refreshing his knowledge from the briefing, the layout of this particular island, the location of the research station tucked in a cluster of trees, the blueprints of the station itself. Going over his equipment, the weapons, the cases for stashing files and samples, the C4 for making an appropriately violent exit.

Everything he needs. Nothing he doesn’t.

Time to get moving.

######  **VENOM:**

**— Island research facility in Lake Kemijärvi, Finland: Before dawn, 15 June 1968 —**

The furry ones shuffle further into their corners, away from them, like they think _they’re_ the one to blame in this situation, like they _want_ to be here, like they think their livers and spleens are actually tasty at all and not barely adequate rations to sustain themself on this toxic, fiery hellhole of a planet.

The hunger gnaws at them, and the atmosphere leaking into their current host’s lungs burns at them with every in-drawn breath. Slow torture. This planet wants them dead, and all the creatures on the planet are going to help.

They take as little as they can from their current host, trying to make this one last. They just have to hold on long enough for another one of those taller, upright things to make a mistake and join the body on the floor. 

That might give them the energy they need to finally break free of this place and find a truly suitable host at last. Something that can sustain them, something they can use to adapt to this hostile world and serve their purpose, prove themself.

They can hold out until then.

They’ve been here on this wretched planet for decades, barely hanging on. Maybe longer. Maybe eons. 

First in a liquid body, so wet, so salty, such a relief after the fire and burning of their descent through the atmosphere. Filled with lives to devour and to bond with, small ones and large ones alike, but none with the necessary chemistry to restore them to health. 

Then in a solid prison so cold, so seemingly unmoving but spreading out over the liquid and through it, devouring and killing the lives in its path and trapping them along with those lives. Slowly grinding along against the rock of the planet’s upper crust. 

Then back into the liquid with a groan, a shatter and a splash, to float and bob and drift, locked in a smaller frozen cage and waiting. Waiting for the prison to melt, waiting to slip back into the liquid where there is life to inhabit, maybe intelligent life somewhere, maybe life that can do more for them as a host than just protect them from the burning atmosphere of this fiery death rock.

Then the glass tube with its seal to keep the atmosphere out. The slowly melting prison now just so much liquid in the tube with them. The tortures from the upright creatures that scooped their icy prison from the much larger liquid and brought it here. Being sectioned off, pieces of themself destroyed while the majority tries to reconsolidate.

The electricity, the sound waves, the eyes watching them, weighing them, making guess after guess. These ones are intelligent, they can tell. The upright ones. Though the one now dead on the floor had very little to offer and didn’t last even half as long as a little furry one, these ones are clearly sentient. One of them should suffice, eventually.

The furry creatures, hopping and fidgeting, twitching and waving their head appendages, becoming hosts, one after another, until there is nothing left to sustain them and they must move on… They are not sentient, but they last longer, so far. Last a few days, mostly, before they must creep quickly to escape the fire and burning of this planet’s atmosphere and find their next host.

But they are patient. They can wait. The upright ones will make another mistake. 

They will be ready.

######  **SOLDIER:**

**— Island research facility in Lake Kemijärvi, Finland: Early morning, 15 June 1968 —**

Despite the roster indicating a full dozen staff at this facility, the Soldier’s cleared his way in so far without encountering a single one. All the likely areas to find researchers at this time of day—sleeping quarters, bathing stations, dining area, kitchen—are empty, empty, empty.

Meaning they’ve been tipped off to this solo raid and are bolted down in a safe room of some sort, or they’ve got a particularly active chapter of their research unfolding and it’s all hands on deck.

Either way is fine with him. He’s blocked off the exits, so this just gives him more time to be thorough without concern that someone will slip out and compromise his secondary mission objective: take no prisoners, only samples. Leave no man behind. That phrase had, for some reason, amused his handler. 

But whatever. He’ll take it, along with the most leisurely infiltration he can recall.

The Soldier pauses in the doorway of what the blueprint termed “specimen holding unit,” but which appears to contain only a floor-to-ceiling wall of caged rabbits in various states of terrified or dead… and a researcher sprawled on the floor with his chest blown open from the inside and a crusted-over trail of slop leading from his throat to those cages.

Not exactly what he thought he’d find.

He knew there’d be rabbits. Researchers like rabbits. They also have a thing for mice and rats, and—if they’re particularly ambitious and lack ethical oversight—cats, dogs, monkeys and all manner of other animals.

That’s scientific researchers for you. Pieces of shit, each and every one of them.

So there are the rabbits, fine. And while the body on the floor is an unexpected bonus, it’s not entirely out of the question that a corpse would land in a specimen holding unit. He’s been the specimen in such units before, and he’s sent several corpses toppling to the floor. One might say it’s a specialty of his.

At the very least, it’s one of the few things he knows for sure about himself.

But there are no actual specimens here. Test subjects, yes. But while there’s a work table opposite the rabbits, there are no specimens. No vials, no beakers, no microscopes with their glass slides. There aren’t even grain pellets or bundles of grass or whatever rabbits eat.

He shrugs. He’ll add it to the report. It’s a scientific research station in the middle of a lake in the middle of pretty much nowhere. It would only count as weird shit going on if there _wasn’t_ any weird shit going on.

As he enters the room, one of the rabbits makes a scuffling sound in its cage and shudders on its side. Guess the test results are in and it’s not good news. But there isn’t anything he can do for the rabbit until he can be sure doing something won’t jeopardize his mission, and it’s looking like it’ll join the dead ones soon enough on its own.

The Soldier takes a moment to kneel by the corpse and give it a cursory inspection. Eino Korhonen, according to the security badge clipped to his coat pocket. That checks out, as do the gloves and plastic face shield. One of the researchers on the roster, and already neatly dispatched for him.

Well. He touches a metal fingertip to the crust. Neatly is a stretch. Effectively, though, that’s true enough. He scrapes a few flakes of the stuff into an envelope from the specimen retrieval kit he was given for this mission.

Ah, and there’s the specimen vial—or at least there’s _a_ vial, probably of the specimen variety—crushed under the body during the fall. There isn’t anything on the surfaces that he can see, but the Soldier carefully gathers up the bits of glass and wraps them in a cloth before depositing them in another envelope. 

Some industrious lab tech or other will be fascinated by this, and the more attention they pay to whatever this is, the less attention they’ll pay him. No complaints there.

The shaking rabbit continues to scrabble around in its cage near the top of the rabbit wall. All the other rabbits have remained completely still this whole time—not even a nose-twitch—the dead ones, for obvious reasons and the terrified ones, well, for different but still obvious reasons. Semi-obvious. Fear, sure, but there’s nothing even remotely frightening in this room. 

Except maybe him, but what’s he going to do to a rabbit, anyway? Nothing.

He stands up and steps over the body on the floor to look at the cages a little more closely. 

Many of the dead rabbits share the researcher’s chest explosion problem, complete with dried slime trail leading from cage to cage. The live ones are all huddled as far away from the shuddering rabbit as they can get in their cages, stock still like they hear an owl overhead and are just hoping it’s targeted someone else.

And the dying rabbit… Because that’s… clearly… That’s clearly what’s happening here… 

The Soldier shakes his head, blinking away the sensation that he’s been standing there for an hour or longer when he knows it’s been only a handful of seconds. Focus. Regain focus. There’s no time on this mission for watching lab animals die, and no reason at all to watch them suffer. 

He’ll just set his equipment down on the table opposite the cages and then pry that cage open to speed things along. There’s no way this rabbit is going to recover, but he’s handled anything remotely time-sensitive in this area of the facility and knows now that he can spare the time to ease— 

Everything is pain. Everything is fire. Everything is searing needles in his skin digging all the way through him and radiating out like a lightning strike to engulf him in white hot molten agony.

He gasps through a throat that is a ragged tunnel of spasming meat, and he cannot breathe— 

He falls, maybe; there is the faintest sensation of collapsing on something, someone, a body, and he cannot breathe—

He tries and tries, but his lungs will not fill with air, they only suck in fire and burning and pain and he cannot breathe— 

He cannot breathe, cannot breathe, cannot— 

######  **VENOM:**

**— Island research facility in Lake Kemijärvi, Finland: Mid-morning, 15 June 1968 —**

_Bounty!_

A feast! 

They slither deeper inside, soaking up the adrenaline as fast as this host can produce it and taking their time fully integrating into the rest of their new host’s neural processes. 

They have learned that lesson from the first few of these larger, upright hosts. The ones early on and the one from yesterday, spent on the floor a mere handful of minutes after being selected. They have to be careful, or the host will die so soon. _Too_ soon. Before they can gain any knowledge or siphon off more than a small burst of energy until the host is too dead to make use of. 

Slowly, slowly, they pick their way throughout the host’s system. Because other than the adrenaline so readily offered in its panic, a sentient host such as this one will struggle to reject any intrusion into its thoughts and— 

Except this one is different again. Despite the clear sentience, there is no resistance to their probing… If anything, the host is actively drawing them further inside, like its mind is a void to be filled. 

The lingering pain and uncertainty of the transfer, those moments between hosts where the planet’s atmosphere tries to incinerate them… The host’s mind greedily snatches at those sensations and adds them to the existing panic roiling about inside.

So accommodating a host. And so full of life. So many tender morsels, and so much more nutritious than the sagging, ill-fed organs of the other upright ones.

They hold themself back with real effort now, determined not to exhaust this most charitable host and strand themself once more in this prison of furry— Of _rabbits_. The host knows them to be rabbits. And the others, _humans_. People. Researchers and scientists. This is a _lab_ , and the torture is _testing_.

Well not anymore. 

Now they’ve got a host with opposable thumbs who can survive this bond long enough to get them out of here without them needing to expose themself or expend their limited energy stores while they regain their strength at long last.

Take that, planet of fire and burning. Now who’s the loser?

All that’s left, then, is to settle in, curl up, and get familiar with their new digs. The planet can wait, and so can their task.

######  **SOLDIER:**

**— Island research facility in Lake Kemijärvi, Finland: Early afternoon, 15 June 1968 —**

Someone’s half-groaning, half-gasping… and it’s infuriating. Some kind of wheezing. Raspy. Reedy. Shallow. A bit shaky, even, like it’s just starting out with this whole breathing thing and hasn’t learned the ropes.

The Soldier imagines a beached fish, gill flaps fruitlessly fluttering open and closed, the tide long since receded. Drying out and dying and still trying to flop to safety.

He rolls over and—oh shit falling _shit!_ —and off a body and into some cages with a clatter of metal arm on metal grill. What the hell.

He coughs and the irritating gasping stops. Oh. The gasping. That was him. Fuck.

Well now that he’s mastered the art of fucking breathing once more, he might as well get going with… With whatever he’s supposed to be doing. Which is… Which is…? 

Huh. Not a great sign.

He sits up and rubs at his eyes, then takes in the room around him. 

Definitely a lab. Lotta rabbits. Table. Dead guy. Eino Korhonen on the badge, plastic face shield. Hm. Not HYDRA lab chic, so he’s probably supposed to have killed him. Maybe he did. The guy’s dead after all. That tends to happen around him.

Strap hanging down from the table. Shoulder strap, not restraint. Good sign.

The Soldier gets to his feet a bit shakier than he’d like—and he’s not reporting that shit if no one saw it—and inspects the contents of the bag on the table. Right. Mhm. Yes. Map, roster, checklist, specimen-handling instructions, pointless gloves, envelopes, tubes. That all makes sense. 

Except it doesn’t explain how or why he ended up on the floor however long ago. 

He reaches down to read the researcher’s watch, cracked but still ticking at a reliable tempo. Shit. That’s a lot of lost time. What’s his deadline for this mission, anyway?

He painstakingly slots his facts into their proper places. Sundown. He has until sundown. That’s still doable. He can get pretty good speed with a canoe, and the handler will see him coming a long way out. Wiggle room. A little micromanagement buffer. 

No one has to know about this last little bit of fuckery in the rabbit room, then. Excellent. 

He gives the rabbits another glance, noting that they’re all huddled in the corners of their cages—the ones that can still do that, anyway—to get as far away from him as they can. Were they like that before? Seems odd. But maybe that’s just rabbit behavior. How the fuck would he know?

It’s a curiosity still, and vaguely concerning somewhere in the back of his head, but he has a mission to complete and a sunset deadline, and that doesn’t leave room for bullshit. He’s already had a bullshit nap in the rabbit room. 

Tick-fucking-tock, time to get moving.

* * *

Ultimately, the Soldier is not impressed with this particular group of researchers. After completing his inward spiral through the facility, noting and collecting anything that might be of passing interest to a white-coated sadist, all he’s seen—again and again—are indications of failed experiments.

That happens, of course, even to the most successful researchers. 

But failed experiments aren’t nearly as terrifying as ones that work, so where the fuck are these researchers? They should at least be scurrying around cleaning up their messes in case some sponsor wants a last-minute tour of the place. Not leaving stringy clumps of sickly gray rot clinging to various surfaces like so much creeping mold and congealed intestines.

Signs point increasingly toward the lot of them being packed in the central panic room, or the quarantine room, or whatever researchers call the room they cower in when shit goes wrong. “Clean room,” maybe. That sounds right, and the blueprint would probably confirm that.

It’s got to be cleaner than the scads of trashed specimen rooms and testing chambers, at least.

So they’re clearly convinced shit has gone wrong. What is less clear is whether the shit going wrong for them is him, or whether that exciting chapter of their research was an out-and-out catastrophe and they’re just waiting for the rescue crew to come extract them from their mess.

Well, he’s not the rescue crew, but depending on how wrong their shit is going, they might still be happy to see him.

Stranger things have happened. He even remembers a few of them.

######  **VENOM:**

**— Island research facility in Lake Kemijärvi, Finland: Late afternoon, 15 June 1968 —**

What’s this? The host has plenty of opportunity to escape. There is a clear indication that the host hates torture-testing, thinks labs are bad places to be, and fears researchers. They are in a lab, filled with researchers who want to torture-test everything. 

What is wrong with this host? While they’ve been settling in and seeing the sights—this is an utterly delectable pancreas—the host has taken them further into the lab, not out of it. Despite their initial nudge to the contrary. 

Is it because the host’s mind and body welcomed them? Does getting a welcome from one of these sentient hosts negate any control they have over them? Or is it just that they are still gathering their strength?

Probably that. They are not so much a loser that they would find a fiery hell planet filled with otherwise suitable hosts who cannot be bent to their will.

**Get out. Go the other way.**

The host stops with a hand—a curious construction of metal that hums with the faint prickling of electricity—on the door. 

There is a wave of confusion, and then: _The fuck? It’s the only room left, and they’re terrified and unarmed. Just finish the mission already. Sundown. Fucking sundown. Get your ass in gear, Soldier._

The host rips the door and off its hinges with a screech of metal that sends a tiny ripple through them. Strong. This host is strong. And makes loud noises on occasion, but nothing too loud or too high. Not yet. They’ll have to watch for that.

Inside are the researchers. The scientists. The ones who poked them and tore them and burned them. Who made the world rock with wretched sonic weaponry. So many researchers, meaty sacks full of mediocre nutrition.

 _Terrified but still fascinated_ , the host’s mind supplies with a mixture of derision and unease as it takes in the room’s contents and files them all away—researchers in protective gear, oxygen tanks, something called a radio that is very bad news, a set of things called cots.

 _Fucking fascinated scientists,_ the host is thinking. _Always ends with bright lights, restraints and a scalpel. No thank you._

The host raises an angled bit of metal toward the radio and destroys it with a rapid and loud projectile, then reaches for the first of the researchers and casually rips the head off before reaching for another. _Tch. Looking at me like that, and not even my scientists. You don’t have the right to study me, pal. Fuck you._

Another of the researchers loses an arm and then a head. _And you, too._

 **Yes,** they croon. This host has the right ideas, after all.

It’s a room full of screaming and fear and the host is awash in satisfaction as the bodies rip apart. It looks like too much fun to just sit back and observe. This host is strong. Strong enough to borrow energy from without risking the host’s life. 

They tweak the host’s brain chemistry to wrest control and slip into something a little more comfortable, flooding through and over the host’s skin and licking their needle teeth before clicking their jaws shut in the first viable threat display they’ve been able to make in what feels like forever. 

Oh, look at the researchers squirm now that the tables have turned. They flex their claws and reach for one of the severed heads. Into their mouth it goes, and then a flood of delicious brains with a delightful crunching pop.

**Yes. Fuck them.**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content Warnings: In this chapter, there are references to and non-descriptive narration concerning harm done to lab animals, particularly rabbits, in the course of lab procedures that do not occur on the page. It is not graphic, but the bunnies are clearly not happy.


	2. Meet Cute

######  **SOLDIER:**

**— Island research facility in Lake Kemijärvi, Finland: Sunset, 15 June 1968 —**

The “clean” room is… empty. 

Not clean by a long stretch, and not _entirely_ empty either, but empty enough to be very, very upsetting. There’s blood splatter, a bit of torn lab coat, a clump of hair. The tanks broken open and in a jumble. The cots, though those are now more twisted metal than anything meant for sleeping on while waiting out a bio-hazard situation or a raid or… both. Maybe both, in this case.

The important thing, the upsetting thing, the impossible thing, is that there are no people here. Not terrified researchers scrambling to evade his grasp, and not even dead researchers torn up, shot, stabbed or otherwise done away with. 

It’s a room where there’s been a fight, sure. But not a room where he’s dispatched his targets with the sort of extreme prejudice he reserves for targets who would gladly treat him to some good old-fashioned experimentation.

So the room is empty, but it _can’t be empty_. There’s only one way in or out, he knows he killed at least three of the group, and he has a vague recollection of… glee? Being taller? Feeling empty and angry and approving and satiated all at once? 

The Soldier shakes his head. The malfunctions are really piling up on this mission. Probably going to be tricky playing that off and avoiding awkward-at-best painful-at-worst troubleshooting back at base. 

Sleep is starting to look really nice. Proper sleep, in his tube, not some impromptu nap on the job. He’s got to be tired. That’s got to be what’s happening here. 

Because even without the clear memory of dispatching every single researcher in this room, there’s no way he’d have let any of them get past him and out into the hallway. So the room simply _can’t_ be empty, for all that it _is_.

Improbable doesn’t seem like a strong enough word for this, and impossible is more defeatist than he’s interested in admitting. This mission was supposed to be a relatively straightforward one. Get in, grab things, kill people, get out. 

But straightforward? Ha. Not this mission. No, there’s gotta be some other word for this shit show.

**Delicious.**

The Soldier spins around—no one, but fucking _no one_ , sneaks up on him!—and finds the hallway as empty as the room itself. 

Not even a blood trail.

What the fuck is _happening?_

Something is very, very wrong here. He hopes it isn’t him. Something this wrong is going to be a pain in the ass for them to fix. And a pain in his ass, too. A pain in his everything. Shit. Nothing fucking delicious about that.

**Not that. The heads, of course.**

The heads?

**Then the lungs and spleens.**

What? He cannot find the source of this voice, no matter how quickly he turns to face it. Who the hell?

**The hearts, the stomachs, so chewy.**

Chewy…? The fuck?

**Livers, so soft, and creamy.**

And now the voice is salivating, decidedly wet for all that it doesn’t exist at all and is just his own fucked up mind being more fucked up than usual.

**And the pancreas… Nothing like a good pancreas…**

…Well, that’s settled then. Sanity is a lost cause if he was ever sane to start with. There’s nothing to gain from panicking in place, and everything to gain from getting the fuck out of here and back to the extraction point. As fast as he can, and at least close to sunset.

First things first. Set up his C4 at strategic points as he reverses his earlier path through the facility. Blueprints indicating here, here, here… All good places for structural support and subsequent damage to same.

And gather up the fucking rabbits on his way out, too. He crams as many of them as will fit into one of the cages; close quarters piled on top of each other, but whatever. Fills another two cages with rabbits, too, and then wires all three cages together for easier hauling through the facility. 

They didn’t do jack shit to deserve any of this, but he’s not going back for a second batch of rabbits or anything else, so they’ll just have to get friendly for a few minutes while he gets them out of here. Something tells him rabbits are born friendly with each other, anyway. Probably live happy rabbit lives out in the woods. Island’s big enough for it.

Of course, he still his has his mission, so one of the live rabbits goes into the cage with the latest dead rabbit, and sorry, pal, but you’re probably not going to enjoy life much. Orders are orders. Specimens are specimens, and you were in a “specimen holding unit.” Life is just like that.

Bit more C4 at the exterior, here and here—bit more over here—add in the remote sensor, test the connection… All in good order, because if there is one thing he is supremely good at, it’s the fun part of saying farewell. 

And no amount of phantom psychosis singing the praises of creamy livers and whatever else is going to stop him from telling these missing—but surely very much dead—researchers exactly how he feels on his way out.

He leaves the cages open at the edge of the copse of trees, watches the rabbits scatter for a moment, and then takes his samples and shit back to the canoe. The sun’s already setting, which is a mark in the “aw fuck” column, but it’s not yet full on dark, and he’s got a live specimen, which might count for something. 

**But I don’t need the rabbit. I have you.**

The Soldier shakes his head, squeezing his eyes shut briefly before resuming his current task. The rabbit he’s settling into the canoe shuffles in its cage, its claws scrabbling at the bottom as it shifts to be as far from him as it can get.

He stands up straight and frowns down at the rabbit. “Look, I know you didn’t get to go be friendly with the others, little guy, but that’s fucking rude.”

Despite the rabbit’s avoidance tactics, he pulls up a few strands of grass and the top of a reed, sliding them into the cage. In response, the rabbit hunkers down smaller and resumes statue-stillness, watching him warily from a beady eye and making not a single move toward the grass. 

Whatever. Maybe that’s not what rabbits eat. How the hell should he know? He hasn’t got much experience with the whole process. Despite something broken in his brain insisting that guts are flavorful or something— 

**They are.**

—he’s pretty sure he’s never eaten much of anything, at any point, or he doesn’t recall if he has.

 **They** **_are!_ **

Sure. Entrails of all sorts are flavorful delights. Why not.

* * *

He’s put fifteen minutes worth of blissfully silent rowing on this gorgeous orange-hued, sunset-streaked lake between himself and the island when he presses the button that sends everything right back into chaos.

Normally, this is a time to appreciate the glorious swell of flame and destruction, the floating embers twirling on the wind, the thrum of the vibrations rocking through him: the final and unarguable “well done” that no handler has yet taken back despite several of them trying.

Give a man C4, and there is no way he won’t find a use for it. 

This time, there is curdling fear and stabbing pain and nauseated shuddering that couldn’t possibly rock this canoe hard enough to nearly tip it, but that absolutely rocks the canoe hard enough to nearly tip it.

For a few seconds, it’s all he can do to keep the damn thing right side up in the water and himself _out_ of the water as the world shakes or he shakes or everything shakes all at once and something shrieks in the distance but also inside his head. 

And even when he has managed to stabilize the canoe and himself, sort of, there’s no time to process what has happened or why it’s happened because the damn unsociable rabbit got knocked into the lake and is definitely going to drown if he doesn’t—

The Soldier only barely manages to get his arms braced on the sides to get into the water without topping all the other samples and the remaining paddle in with him when the rabbit… surfaces.

Not of its own volition or anything—that sort of thing is impossible just because the cage is well-latched and heavy as fuck compared to a rabbit’s buoyancy. But what _does_ happen is just about as impossible as the rabbit escaping to the surface on the power of a good kick. 

Because what does happen is that there is a— 

A something— 

A tentacle, like on that unnerving lapel patch the handlers wear, maybe— 

And it’s lifted the cage out of the water. Black, prehensile, wet, and glistening. Stretchy but liquid but solid… 

A tentacle, but no, not as solid as that. And if he can think of it as something else, that’d be better. Less like home, less like HYDRA. 

A vine, maybe, with creeping roots wiggling and writhing into and out of the whole. Or a fraying rope made of tiny living snakes that slither and extend and then melt back into the mass with the others. Or— 

The _something_ holds the cage above the canoe where it had been nestled before—and somewhat accurately for an eyeless, lake-swelling snake-vine.

**You want it?**

Great, the voice is back.

Some small part of him figures this is a good time to settle back into a more firmly seated position in the canoe, because if this thing is in the water, he doesn’t want to be. The vast majority of him, however, is frozen with his hands braced on the sides, half lifted up in preparation to go over. 

To retrieve the rabbit that some lake creature has— 

No. 

Wait. 

The… the something doesn’t go from the end swinging the rabbit cage to an end somewhere down in the water. It goes from the cage… around… behind him… 

He follows the many writhing lines of the viscous black arc with his eyes until he can’t anymore, and then turns his head to see where it ultimately disappears into—and, _oooh_ , that’s not good—his own back. 

At least it doesn’t hurt? There aren’t many scientifically interesting situations he can say that about, and he knows all about scientifically interesting situations, having been in quite a few.

He turns back around and places his ass firmly in the canoe. 

“Yes, I want it,” he says. Why the fuck not? What does it hurt at this point to talk back? “In the boat.”

**Here you go.**

The black… vine-thing? Sure, the black vine-thing releases the rabbit cage and withdraws—eugh, no no no—into his own damn self.

It’s inside him, not on him. It is fucking _inside_ of him.

It’s the rabbit’s fault. It _has_ to be the rabbit. 

Not the living one that’s shivering in the farthest corner of its cage and looking balefully in his direction; the dead one. The one that wasn’t dead when he first met it, the one that he’d… 

Yes, now he remembers. He’d wanted to put it out of its misery. Because it had been suffering. Whatever they’d done to it was killing it slow and painful, and he didn’t think— _still_ doesn’t think—that was right. 

But whatever was wrong with that rabbit is now probably wrong with _him_. It’s not about the rabbit anymore. _He’s_ the specimen now. 

Fuckity-fuck. 

**I like those sounds. Make them again.**

Oh, yes. It’s definitely talking to him. In his head, because it’s inside of him. Fantastic.

“Fuckity-fuck,” he says aloud, keeping his voice as low and soft as he can, even though there’s no way it could travel over the water as far as it would need to for the handler to hear it.

**Mmm.**

He has the sensation of something intangible shifting through his mind with a pleased squirm.

This is probably the worst outcome this mission could have had, at least where he’s concerned. He’s not interested in being a specimen again. He’s far more interested in being the Soldier and going to sleep for a long time in his nice cold tube.

Because it is fucking hot out here, even though the metal arm is telling him it’s a relatively warm evening for the Lapland but still pleasantly cool. Doesn’t matter. The metal arm is lying because he’s malfunctioning all over the place, or he’s developing a fever. Neither is a good option.

There aren’t many good options, in fact, as far as he can see. This qualifies as an unmitigated disaster.

But at least he can try to dry the rabbit off, since it’s shivering in its cage and he’s not soaked through from taking a dip in the lake to retrieve the poor thing. There. That’s something he can do to mitigate the disaster. 

Sort of. Doesn’t mitigate _his_ disaster any, but it’ll still feel good to make the rabbit more comfortable.

The rabbit, of course, has very different ideas about this situation and would apparently prefer to scramble and squirm its way fully back into the lake than be handled by him, which if he’d been thinking more clearly, he imagines he’d have realized before the other potential specimen fucking escaped with a splash.

**You want it back?**

“No,” he mutters into his hands. “Let it swim to some shore or other and live a rabbity life doing whatever rabbits do.”

He groans and rubs at his face. The metal hand feels so nice and cool against his skin. Yeah, he’s definitely got a fever. Fuck this shit.

And fuck that dead rabbit in particular. Passing on specimenhood like this. The mission briefing did not include this particular potential hazard. He picks up the cage with its remaining specimen and tosses the whole thing overboard, dead rabbit and all. 

Coming back with a dead rabbit indicates that there were potentially live ones he could have brought as well, and why didn’t he? Coming back with no rabbit at all indicates he didn’t find any lab animals worth bringing back, no questions needed. 

Doing a completely shitty job is safer than doing a mostly shitty job. Go figure.

By now it’s well past sunset, but he can still see the outline of the missing paddle in the distance, barely illuminated by the first glimmers of moonlight on the lake. He’s been drifting a bit while wrestling a surprisingly agile rabbit and trying to think his way out of whatever it is that’s wrong with him. 

The paddle’s been drifting, too, and in the opposite direction, so the damn thing is well out of any practical reach. He’d be wasting time getting the thing, and while he’s blown through his deadline enough that it doesn’t matter how late he shows up, there’s always the chance he misses it by so much they come get him. 

Which is pretty much never a pleasant thing. So there isn’t actually much time to waste on this paddle. 

Unless… 

“Hey, uh. Voice.” The Soldier extends his right arm toward the distant paddle. “I kinda want that paddle. Help me out with that?”

The black leather of his tac sleeve darkens further, as though he’d held it in water until even the well-oiled leather was soaked through. From mid-forearm to gloved fingers, it glistens with the slick wet ink that had previously formed a ropy tentacle—yeah, fuck it, these are tentacles—to grab the rabbit cage.

His fingertips extend, stretching out like sticky heat-damaged rubber, half-melted with almost gelatinous bulges rippling through the mass as it joins together and wraps around the paddle. 

He makes a grabbing motion, just because that feels like the right thing to do, and the tentacle retracts back into his hand, clinging to him as it gradually recedes like gum pulling off a slick surface, only instead of pulling off, it’s… climbing inside, leaving him holding a paddle like nothing bizarre and impossible had just happened.

**Paddle acquired.**

“Thanks.”

So it listens to his thoughts, listens to his voice, speaks to him, likes… to help him out? Huh. Well, in that case… 

_Hey_ , he thinks at it, because really, at this point, what is the worst that can happen if he tries to reason with it? _What exactly are you?_

**I am Venom.**

Helpful. A toxin does make sense, though. The mission briefing didn’t mention any such thing in specific, but it’s always a possibility in a lab. He’s usually unaffected by those, but… Well, obviously not this time. 

He’d bring it up in the mission report, but that would just pique their interest. He can do without that. And he actually _can_ do without that if this rabbit venom wants to help him out. 

**Not rabbit venom. Venom. I** **_am_ ** **Venom. You are mine.**

 _Okay_ , he thinks to the voice. 

He isn’t, of course, though it pays to please. He belongs to HYDRA, not Venom. But that doesn’t sit right, either, and HYDRA, as far as he can tell, does not want to help him out. Particularly now that he is once more a source of fascination.

But if he plays these cards right, he won’t be a source of fascination because they won’t know there’s anything fascinating going on.

 _So, I’m going to row this boat across the lake_ , he thinks. _And then I’m going to need to pretend like you aren’t here. It would help sell the ruse if there weren’t any tentacles or sudden voices or blackouts._

**Where are we going? What is across the lake?**

_My handler. He’s going to drive us home._

**Where is home?**

_Russia. A HYDRA base. We can go to sleep. Rest._

**Mm.** There’s a sense of internal debate that is somehow even more internal than just inside-his-head internal. **We’re going where there are a lot of people?**

_Er, yes? There are a lot of people. Handlers._

There’s a semi-distrustful consideration now, like something about handlers is setting this Venom creature on edge. Which is odd. Handlers are a normal part of life, nothing to be particularly on edge about so long as everything stays as the handlers expect it to be.

 _You’ll see,_ he adds. _It’s normal. Nothing to be upset about. This is just how it’s supposed to be. But I need to act like things are_ all _normal, including you not being here, so…_

**I got it. I will help you out, and then you will help me out.**

_Sure_ , he thinks. Time enough to find out what that means later.

And then he’s, well, not alone in his own head, exactly. But the feeling of something present just behind his eyes has faded to a vague notion that there’s someone behind him, or maybe just lurking in the back of his head.

He supposes he’ll take it and see how far it’ll get him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content Warnings: In this chapter, the bunnies continue to be unhappy, but no animals are actually harmed in the course of the chapter. The same cannot be said for human beings, who were very much harmed between the last chapter and this one.


	3. Road Tripping

######  **SOLDIER**

**— Räisäläntie 9452, Finland: Well after dark, 15 June 1968 —**

“Report, Soldier.”

The “what took you so long” part of that is unspoken but carried in the tone very clearly. Fun times ahead, that’s for sure. It’s a great foot to start out on after the day he’s had.

He still takes his sweet time getting the canoe pulled ashore and the contents safely set on the grass. Satchel stuffed to the gills with binders and whatnot, clipboard contents, charts and whatever else. Samples case with assorted bits and bobs. No rabbits, more’s the pity. 

And himself, of course. Down one round to take out the radio, and that’s it for expended equipment—regardless of what Venom did back there, the Soldier had used his own two hands. C4 isn’t equipment, in this case, and he doesn’t have any left regardless. The handler would be a fool to expect him to have any leftovers where explosives are concerned. 

That’s one of the areas where he’s proud to be predictable. If he _can_ blow something up, he _will_ blow something up. 

**That was** **_you?_ ****You made that noise?**

He flinches at the sudden wave of incredulous accusation and dismay—and the voice itself, really—and swats at an insect that doesn’t exist to mask the movement. _Yes, and also shut up._

**Right. Shutting up. Fuckity-fuck.**

“Mission objective complete,” the Soldier says, aiming for—and actually managing to hit despite the urge to shake his head—a low and dry just-the-facts tone and phrasing. He adds a few more loops onto the coil of rope while the handler watches. Slow, careful, methodical. Normal. 

There is not a second idiot in his skull with him. Nope. Normal, normal, normal.

“The targets have been eliminated and all samples of note have been retrieved.” He nods toward the sample case and files, keeping the motion brief. And to address the handler’s impatience, with just a hint of judgment to his tone: “The facility’s layout differed from the provided blueprint.” 

Someone’s going to be unhappy with the results of that lie, but it won’t be him, because the research station is so thoroughly destroyed that it’s his word against the word of some squirrely informer. Informers and turncoats are not the most trustworthy. 

Neither is he, really. He’s a tool and they all know it. Tools can backfire. Why else would they watch him so closely? But unlike an informer, he would never lie. After all, he’s not capable of it. 

**Clever. But why? Why do they think you are—**

_Not. Now._ If he could mentally grit his teeth at this Venom creature without actually clenching his jaw and drawing attention, he would.

**Fuckity-fuck.**

_You need to stop that. I’m going to smile if you continue._

**That would be bad.**

_Yes. That would be_ very _bad. I don’t smile._

 **Don’t eat. Don’t enjoy livers or heads. Don’t smile. What** **_do_ ** **you do?**

_Shhhhhh._

**Right.**

The handler, at least, seems not to notice this thought process while opening the back of the transport vehicle and folding down the rack for storing the canoe and his pilfered files and samples on the drive back. 

The Soldier stashes the canoe himself, then holds the bags out, specifically not handing things to the handler, but just offering them in general. He knows protocol, follows protocol, acts like normal because everything _is_ normal. Normal, normal, normal.

Except it’s probably not normal for him to be feverish and sweating from a mission that’s practically a cakewalk, and he can feel the heat still building all through his body, along with a slick queasiness throughout his torso. There’s no way he won’t be at least a little flushed by the time they arrive at wherever they are going now.

He’s going to be fascinating either way, isn’t he? Shit _fuck_.

“And the bodies?”

**Were delicious. Especially the heads.**

He tries to block out Venom’s voice and the ripple of delight over heads and can’t quite manage it. It’s just so… everywhere. All through him like a full-body vibration, and not just in the air around him like a person’s voice.

He’s positive he’s never eaten, has no recollection of enjoying anything that’s ever crossed his lips, whether it’s a strip of rubber or a leather strap he’s pulling taut. Blood spatter isn’t terrible, but it’s not something to go around licking up. Mud and swamp water, sand, turf of assorted varieties… 

Yes, there are a lot of things he has tasted, nothing he’s eaten, and nothing he’s fond of. This glee over spongy gray matter and brittle skulls with tender-tough muscles that hold out and then give smoothly— 

Well, he does know the glee of a knife slipping through various portions of human anatomy. Maybe that’s why the delicious heads sensation he’s picking up from Venom resonates with him. Teeth could be a kind of knife. 

And ripping limbs off torsos and and organs out of chest cavities… Hmm. The sudden give of tension as things tear apart could be an overlap for eating. Chewing. Maybe. If that’s even what happened back there. “Delicious” _would_ seem to indicate— 

“Soldier! Pay attention.” The handler has the back of the transport vehicle partially closed. The door that’s still open is where he goes, the second part of the mission cargo being delivered back to base. 

**Cargo?**

He gets in with a muttered apology, which is of course not a sufficient reply. He does know better. It’s just hard to think with everything going on, and the budding headache slowly reaching up from his shoulders to settle behind his eyes.

“What of the bodies, Soldier? We can’t have them identified or traced to us.”

“The bodies cannot be traced or identified, not even by dental records.” Because he… ate them? That can’t be right, but they definitely disappeared—were there and then _weren’t_ —and Venom—

**I am here.**

_Yeah, no shit. That’s at least half the problem at the moment._

His sense of the handler’s suspicion is strong and sudden, like a premonition of some sort. Some kind of unspoken, unseen warning that is nevertheless clear and bright in his mind. The handler has made some decision or other, and he won’t like it.

“Even an expert retrieval agent would be hard pressed to locate the remains,” he says, relying for tone and cadence on habit born of countless earlier missions he can’t recall. “No one will discover who they belong to,” he adds, putting all his usual certainty of a job well done into his voice. 

Because he’s pretty sure now that he fucking ate them. Somehow. Venom had been almost giddy while listing organs. He can see that now that he knows this is all real. And he’d been very insistent that those researchers tasted good and were full of nutrients.

**Because they were.**

And if Venom is inside him, and ate those men, then it follows that _he_ … Except how did… There’s not even room for him to have… Where would they all _go?_ Wherever they went, they’re well-nigh unretrievable, except that one in the rabbit room that he had nothing to do with dispatching, so the mission is complete either way, but still… 

The handler slams the cargo door and goes around to the front to drive.

 _What the fuck_ happened _back there?_

**We ate well, that’s what.**

He tries to convey a disbelieving mental huff, as much as that’s possible. ‘We’ _did?_ he thinks. You _did, maybe._ I _don’t eat. That’s something people do._

 **You are people.** He gets a sense of mingled confusion and amusement, so it is definitely possible to convey these things. **Two legs. Two arms. One head with big, juicy eyes. Upright. Covered in the skins of others. You are very much people.**

 _Do I taste like people?_ It’s not that he wants to know, but he kind of wants to know. How could anyone not want to know? Especially someone who has never eaten anything before. Do people taste of salt and metal, like their blood? Or something else? And what does he taste like?

 **Better.** There’s some kind of invisible nod that he feels somewhere he can’t put a finger on. **The other ones were floppy. And stiff. At the same time. Your organs are plump and sweet, and you have energy. A life force that can survive some nibbles.**

 _Well. Good to hear I have plump innards._ Maybe those plump innards are what’s setting everything on fire inside his ribcage. He’s kind of regretting not dunking himself in the lake when he had the chance.

Sadly, they aren’t anywhere near the lake anymore, having somehow commenced driving eastward on Räisäläntie without his realizing it, toward what the signs indicate is Tonkopuro and E63 beyond it. Definitely back to Russia, either E63 or 82, maybe some back roads. Maybe they will be in a helicopter after eventually crossing the border. 

Maybe it will be back to the Siberia base up near Norilsk that they go to. He seems to spend a lot of there. It’s clearly a handler favorite.

On the one hand, it’s that particular Siberia base. From what he’s seen of it, it’s snow and ice all year round, that far north. He can cool down even without sleeping in his tube. On the other hand, it’s that particular Siberia base. He usually sleeps for years up there. He wants the sleep, needs the rest, but doesn’t feel like waking up _years_ from now. He’d rather wake up sooner.

**What is Siberia?**

_Part of Russia. It’s a place. One of the places we go to sleep for a while. It’s nice?_

**You do not want to go there.**

He can’t tell if that’s meant to be advice or a statement of his own unspoken thought process, in which case, it’s maybe a little disturbing that this creature can read his mind even when he’s not trying to project his thoughts to it. 

Either way, though, the response is the same. 

_It’ll be fine if we end up there._

Because it will be. A base is a base is a base, and he can sleep however long they feel he should and not be hurt by it. What’s a longer sleep cycle to him? Different handlers when he wakes up? That might as well already happen for all he remembers them.

Venom seems to not quite believe him, in a wave of silence that conveys a raised eyebrow and enough doubt for several people. But there’s nothing more forthcoming, so he just tips his head back against the wall of the vehicle and focuses on the rumble of the road and not the acute gnawing sensation in his stomach.

He’s not sure how long it’s been—he’s had his eyes closed, so has missed a number of road markers—when Venom next stirs.

 **Who** **_is_ ** **this handler? You do not have many thoughts of him.**

He can’t see how it even matters, since they’re all pretty much the same, but he shrugs, only remembering at the last second to carry the motion through into what hopefully looks more like natural shifting into a new position and less like a shrug in response to nothing. 

Just rolling his shoulders. Nothing to see back here. Carry on. Everything is normal, normal, normal.

 _He’s a handler_ , he thinks, wondering if it’s even worth reminding this creature that there’s supposed to be a moratorium on exactly this sort of thing for the sake of pretending he isn’t even possessed and nothing happened back at the facility. Probably not worth it.

**What is his name?**

_…I don’t know. It doesn’t matter_ , he reiterates, in case the creature had missed his indirect thought about that earlier. Just how much of his inner thinking has to be directed _at_ Venom in order to be understood? Something to discover over time, he supposes, if he makes it long enough with all this fever and shit.

 **Names matter. I am Venom. That** **_matters_** **. It tells you something.**

A pause, perhaps as it comes up with an example. Maybe for some other reason. Venom seems able to read his mind pretty easily, but the same doesn’t work in reverse.

 **What’s** **_your_ ** **name?**

_That doesn’t matter, either._

**You don’t know it.** There’s that sensation of amusement and confusion again, edging against mockery except for the hint of pity. 

He shifts irritably, half-forgetting to make this seem natural and mumbling an expletive when he realizes it, which is even less natural. Fucking _fuck!_ He wipes his forehead on his right sleeve, because it’s fucking hot in here and he’s already fucked up on the stillness front, so why not.

 _No, I don’t_ , he mentally snaps back. Should have answered that he doesn’t have one. Shit.

He’s never so much as thought about a name for himself. What does he need a name for? He’s the Soldier. He has a codename. It’s on all his files. Isn’t that enough? Beyond that, names only matter to identify a target or a location. It isn’t as though they actually say anything about the named person or place.

Although, given the way he’s feeling between the fever, the aches, the hints of vertigo, and all the rest… He does have to admit that as far as significant names go, Venom’s appears to be accurate. No wonder all those fucking rabbits died. He wouldn’t mind curling up on his side and shaking himself to death, either. 

Except then he’d be dead, and that’s not exactly an outcome he wants. Why be dead when he can be useful?

 **What** **_is_ ** **a handler, then?**

 _Oh, good. We’re back on this._ He’s halfway toward groaning at another question before he bites it back. He’s really sucking at this pretending things are normal. And since Venom is distracting him, it’s not even entirely his fault. 

_A handler is a handler. They… handle things._

He lifts his right hand off his thigh a few inches, just enough to see that yes, it _is_ shaking slightly. Even without a fucking tentacle monster posessing him and chattering away in his head—no doubt, literally in his head, curled up in his brain somewhere—he’s not going to escape attention. Fuck everything.

 _A handler directs me on ops,_ he continues. _Delivers mission objectives. Keeps tabs on things. Like the guy driving the vehicle._

And honestly, he’s pretty thankful for them. He can’t imagine having to keep all this shit straight by himself. He’s pretty lucky if he remembers the faces he wakes up to, without having to try to coordinate a mission. He’s only good for so much, even when he is useful.

Far, far better the handlers give him his targets, get him in position and set him loose. He knows what to do once he’s doing it, but it helps to have handlers with all their direction, even if it’s a pain in the ass being watched all the time.

**What are you, then?**

_I’m the Soldier. Codename: Winter Soldier._

**Real name: I don’t know.**

_Fuck_ you, _asshole. It’s kind of a name._ Probably enough of a name that it counts for the whole stupid notion of telling people something about the item being named.

Winter. Cold, desolate, lonely, unfriendly, likely to kill you if you aren’t prepared and sheltered, and might just kill you even if you are. Soldier. Violent, takes orders well, complies inside and out, loyal to… well, obedient to HYDRA, even if there’s something very off about his owners that prevents him from true loyalty.

For whatever reason, there’s no response to the ‘fuck you’ or to the ‘asshole,’ and only a faint impression of approval and camaraderie with the sense that the thoughts resonate with the presence in his mind.

**Are there many soldiers?**

_Just me._ And thank whatever and whoever for that, because the world only needs one of him, that’s for sure. He notices his breathing is shallow, clears his throat and forces his lungs to take in a full breath. Though if this thing is going to kill him, maybe it’d be better if there was a backup to do his job.

Venom’s presence shifts around, processing his response like running tight laps in the training room, but he can’t access the thoughts the way Venom can pick at his own. There’s something being planned, though. 

And he’s intelligent enough, even if he’s mostly devoid of memories. Eventually, he’ll figure out how to do that mind-reading thing, too. It’s his own damn mind, after all. Technically, at least. If his semi-welcome guest can pry, then he should be able to, also. That’s only fair. He just has to find out how.

 **Well,** Venom finally says, **as long as there are a lot of handlers.**

 _Yeah. Sure._

Maybe he should ask what Venom wants handlers for. But does it matter? Who cares what he wants them for? There’s either enough time before this thing kills him to learn how to read Venom’s mind and find out why, or not enough time to be bothered by it.

Anyway, the way he’s feeling like death being actively roasted instead of merely warmed over, as long as they let him sleep when he gets his report delivered, he doesn’t care about much of anything. 

Starting over again will be nice.

**About the fire and the noise.**

Oh for fuck’s sake. 

_Yeah?_ he thinks at Venom. _What about them? Are you going to tell me they were magical and you’re sorry for trying to drown us when the fireworks went off?_

 **You destroyed the home the researchers had built. I approve, but.** There’s a pause. **I do** **_not_ ** **like your style.**

 _Going to have to say ‘tough shit’ to that, buddy._

**You would not say that. It would not be** **_normal_ ** **to say that now. You are afraid of not-normal.**

He sighs, and almost doesn’t care that it’s plain as day to the handler. _I wouldn’t say it out loud. I’m saying it to you. Tough shit. I blow things up. Get used to it._

 **I don’t like fire. Get used to** **_that_** **.**

 _You’re welcome to find a rabbit and hitch-hop your way to the ocean._ He wipes his brow again, because what the hell ever. He’s not going to convince a single handler he’s in good shape and all is well. He’s almost positive he’s already failed at that. 

**A** **_rabbit!?_ **

_Yeah, then possess a big fish or something and never see another fire in your life. However long that’ll be._

**I do not want a** **_rabbit!_ ** **I have** **_you_** **. You are better than a rabbit.**

_Thanks. Better than a rabbit. That means a lot._

**You are welcome.**

The Venom creature might be able to read his thoughts, but it does not appear to understand sarcasm. 

He does shake his head this time, and sees out of the corner of his eye that the handler is looking in the rear view mirror at him. Yeah, whatever bit of cover he was hoping to use by pretending things were normal is long gone.

Time to just face the music: He’s fucking scientifically fascinating, and they’ll all know it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content Warnings: In this chapter, there are no bunnies, but plenty of existential whatsits and suffering Soldiers.


	4. Canon-Typical Violence

######  **VENOM**

**— HYDRA base outside of Norilsk, Russia: Mid-afternoon, 16 June 1968 —**

So this is a “base.” 

The host had had a lot to say on their lengthy journey about a base in general—place to rest, place to return to after activity, place to be stored, as though there are many hosts and they will be rotating through the lot of them. But only one is the Soldier, and the rest are handlers, and therefore about as pathetic as the one who drove them to this base. 

And who stopped several times along the way only to put something in a “tank” and then disappear into a building that was not a base for several minutes, each time returning smelling like dead meat and burned fat, and once still chewing whatever ghastly, nutrient-deficient corpses had been squished into a thin tube of that dead meat. 

“Jerky,” the host had supplied. And, “meat stick.” There had not been much joy in the host’s thoughts, which is understandable considering what the handler was consuming. If this is what people eat, this host might not be a person, after all.

The base, now that they have finally arrived, is massive, dark, filled with shaped metal tubing, and made out of rock. None of which they mind overmuch. 

Darkness is fine, the vastness of space contained in cramped quarters. Metal tubing offers pathways for travel between areas without detection, even just to extend a tendril or two while otherwise inhabiting this host. And rock is the most natural part of this fiery hellscape of a planet.

Except that the planet seems to be less and less a fiery hellscape as they make use of this host to adapt to it, and except that this rock is unnatural—is some sort of composite, compiled rock. 

Someone took the time to grind up existing rocks into powder and then turned them back into sturdy rock again, just so they had straight walls to surround themselves with, because natural pockets and caverns are not enough, apparently, and carving things out of other things is not aesthetically pleasing, as far as the host can tell. 

If this is the sort of wasteful thing the people do on this planet, that’s another point toward this host being something other than a person.

This host—this “Soldier,” which is more title than name—may have a flagrant disregard for the dangers of fire and loud noises, but it is not wasteful. The host puts forth exactly as much effort as a task needs, and no more. Does exactly the tasks needed, and no more. Is exactly as obedient as is needed, and no more.

It is a smart practice, not a lazy one. And it is their own preference as well.

Probably why their team lead and companions consider them a loser back on Klyntar.

They do not seem to think this host is a loser on this planet, though. They fear this host. Are terrified. They know that look in a human’s eye—the researchers were afraid of them, too, though that did not stop them from torture-testing where they were concerned. Or where the rabbits were concerned, and the researchers were afraid of the rabbits toward the end, too.

Rabbits. This host is obsessed with those things, and it is catching.

It might be a malfunction, this obsession with rabbits. This host’s mind keeps circling back to them, sometimes with pity, sometimes with anger. Always with a sense of solidarity. Because this host identifies with the rabbits almost as much as _they_ identify with this host.

Interesting.

It is not hurting anything, though, the rabbit fixation, which can’t be said for a lot of other things. This host’s liver functions are still doing well enough, and while it is getting hotter and hotter all through the host’s body, the damage to organs is being repaired almost as fast as they are causing it. 

That will keep this host going for a long time, longer even then the rabbits, though the host itself does not seem to think it will last very long. But for all that, it is not sustainable indefinitely. The host’s systems will be exhausted, the organs will fail, and they will need to find another host.

Despite this one being such a perfect match. 

The meal at the other home, all those heads and the meat-packed snacks below them, had certainly helped them stabilize, helped them latch on more fully to this host. But now the host itself needs a meal, needs one desperately, and yet does not think that it eats meals. Has never even eaten a head. Not a single one.

They shake their head—or rather, shake the host’s head—and then murmur “fuckity-fuck” into their collective consciousness as an apology. That is such a fun thing to say. 

_Stop it! Fucking_ stop _it. Do you_ want _me smiling? You are going to ruin this worse than I already have!_

**Stopping.**

Fuckity-fuck, indeed. It is so hard to remember that this host can hear them so clearly and seems aware of even their feelings and thoughts. The rabbits did not do any such thing. And the other people rejected their advances so thoroughly that each one of them accomplished nothing but dying on them before they could be fully emptied out, or even half of the nutrients extracted.

Not this host. They shift around contentedly and twine around heart and lungs, so tasty but not to be eaten. Just a nibble, just a lick along the surface. This host is perfect. But also still dying. It needs to eat to restore its own energy or there will be nothing for them to borrow to sustain themself between meals.

There are, at least, plenty of these “handlers” scurrying around the base. And while the handlers are aware of something very wrong with this host, they do not yet know what that is. Or who. If the handlers do not provide a meal for this host to eat soon, they will find out who is wrong with their Soldier, because they will eat a few of them to protect this host’s organs.

That will blow on their cover, for sure. But it will be worth it. Better a blown on cover than trying to find a replacement so soon after finding a good match. They will never set this planet up for colonization if they spend their time hopping—like a rabbit—from host to host.

Stability is good. A goal. For them and for their host.

And stability means a meal.

And maybe more of this cold water being sprayed everywhere. It is very nice to have the internal fires set back a few paces by the nearly freezing water. Everything is cooling off very nicely. The host is even shivering. So much more comfortable than the feverish shaking from earlier with all those skins clinging to them and moist with sweat.

So, more of the water, but not more of whatever that large metal contraption is in the center of this part of the base. That item means nothing at all to the host, but it feels very dangerous. Like fire and char, like lightning. So far just a low hum, but there is no guarantee that it will stay that way.

Two of the handlers with white coats, who look more like the researchers from the other place than the handler from the car, are discussing something the host ignores completely. Why ignore it? Handlers give direction, according to the host, and yet these directions are not worth listening to? 

“You don’t want to wipe him first?”

The second handler makes a scrunchy face. Very expressive creatures, people. The rabbits also did that with their noses. Might be a planetary trait. 

“Could be we’re wiping him too often,” the nose-scruncher says. “Might be what’s led to this latest… instability, in which case…” The handler raises both shoulders, arms otherwise held at its sides.

Wiping, whatever that is, is not what has led to whatever instability the handlers are discussing, as they could mention if they were interested in being discovered so soon. That dubious honor belongs to them, for the time being. And possibly will until the handlers can supply the nutrition this host needs to resume normal functionality.

“Mm. I could see that. But it’s standard practice, is all, and…”

That seems like a thing to know about. Forget the expressive nose-twitch of the land-based life forms here and the discussion of standard practices. There is another curiosity that might have significance.

**What is “wiping?”**

_I don’t know._

That has all the sound of truth, but it is also something that _cannot be_ true. If this “wiping” is standard procedure, then it follows that it should be a procedure the host is familiar with.

 **One of them wants to wipe you,** they clarify, in case the host needs context for the term, **but the other does not want to wipe you.**

 _Okay._

The shrug is only partially mental, the rest showing up in a physical twitch of shoulders, and there is no sense of struggling to contain the motion like there was in the vehicle. The host is tired. And hungry. But this is a base where they will rest, so part of that will be fixed soon. And the handlers will make a meal for them, one way or another.

In the meantime… They are no closer to knowing what “wiping” refers to. And the tone being used points to it having considerable significance.

**Why do they want and not want to wipe you?**

A mental sigh. _I don’t know._

**…You do not know much of anything, do you?**

_I know what is needful_ , the host snaps _._ _Nothing unnecessary._

Ah. There is the host’s indignation and irritation, that spark of energy and the self-restrained activity. It is good to know that this host is resilient enough to maintain a fighting spirit when slowly succumbing to organ failure due to lack of a meal. It will be a great advantage in the future. Certainly no other host they have bonded to on this wretched planet has had this ability.

No other host has been so capable of thought, so long-lived, and yet also so very empty and unknowledgeable about its environment and circumstances.

 **It** **_is_ ** **very uncluttered in here,** they mutter, sorting through the scant handful of half-glimpses into prior activities and thoughts. **Neat. Tidy. I hate it. Not much to look at.**

_‘Fraid it doesn’t get much better, pal. I’m bound to forget a lot of this op in time for the next one._

**You anticipate this forgetting? And yet do nothing to prevent it?**

Surely the people on this planet have memory-retaining systems in place. The others, while too short-lived to unwillingly grant them access to their minds, had had minds that were full to bursting with what looked at a semi-distance to be facts and figures.

 _They say it’s a lucky thing I remember as much as I do._ The host shrugs again, this time getting snapped at by a handler for moving while they try to put fresh skins on it.

_These are clothes, not skins. It’s a uniform. I wear it on base._

**It is made from skin hacked off of the once-living.**

_…Only part of it is leather. This one’s mostly wool. That’s not…_ There is an uncertain pause as, once again, the host demonstrates an incomplete grasp of its own homeworld. _Wool is sheep hair, not sheep skin. The sheep survive the harvest._

Well, the host seems confident enough in that last bit. It is still practical and ruthless to make use of the life forms around them, and they still approve, even if the sheep live through it. Approves more, in fact, because if the sheep survive the process, they can be used again and again. Like a host that lasts.

Like this host will be once some things are ironed out.

Such as the heating issue. Now that there is not a jet of freezing water blasting it from many sides, the host is warming up again. Will likely become feverish again. Probably never truly cooled down.

And is so empty, rapidly depleting of nutrients for itself and for them with the regeneration and lack of input to sustain it.

**When are they going to put the food out for you to eat?**

_I don’t think they do that. I told you_ , the host thinks without irritation, _I don’t eat. That’s a thing people do, and I’m the Soldier, not a person._

The handlers are leading the host to the contraption, something they call a chair. There were chairs in the other place, too, around a table. The place the host’s mind tells them was marked a “cafeteria” on a blueprint, a place where people eat.

This may be a good thing. There is no table, and they sense no food nearby except for the handlers themselves, but everything else has seemed to happen according to a schedule and pattern. All in good time.

And that time needs to be soon or they might not be able to avoid actively snacking on the host any longer. There are certain chemicals in the host’s body that are becoming scarce, and this is less easily regenerated without the input needed to build more.

**When do we rest, then? And where? Is it in this chair?**

_I don’t—_

The host shakes its head and the handlers to their right mutter nervously as they hang up pouches of liquid on a pole. Other handlers holding metal sticks shift on their feet and look grim.

“No, it’s not in the chair,” the host mutters.

A surprising response, that. **I half expected “I don’t know.” And you should not be speaking. The cover, remember? Now it is** **_you_ ** **who is going to blow on it.**

 _Blow it_ , the host thinks, _not blow on it._ It resumes its outward silence in the face of a few handlers coming forward looking more terrified than before and also determined to do something about the source of their fear. 

They will have to do something about these handlers, should they try anything.

 _There’s a tube behind us. That’s where we rest, and_ no, _I don’t know when._

The host projects impatient bitterness in that last bit, and Venom smirks and caresses a lobe of liver in response. Such a feisty host.

_That’s fucking weird. Stop it._

They poke the liver once to demonstrate that they will stop when they want to stop and not until then, but otherwise don’t respond. 

Despite the handlers’ tension, the flood of liquid into the host’s veins is at least filled with glucose and a few other choice items; yes, some of them even worthwhile building blocks for the chemicals they need, while affording the host what is needful to speed its regeneration.

Here, maybe, is the meal. It is far better than a stick made from desiccated dead flesh.

 _It’s cold in the tube_ , the host continues, thoughts growing vague, drifting into a mental mumble. _Eventually, the handlers’ll be… if not happy with the mission, then… satisfied. Then we can sleep._

 **In a tube.** They do not like that. Tubes mean specimen holding. Tubes mean scientists and researchers. Tubes mean torture-testing. If they have a tube big enough to hold the host, intact, then… 

Then this is not a home where they will rest and sleep and eat well. It is another research facility, and this host is so used to being torture-tested that it considers all of this to be normal and a base to be a home to happily return to. 

They might allow a host to do a number of foolish things that ultimately would not hurt the cause, but willingly being torture-tested is not one of them. They had been thinking perhaps they could take a few snacks at a time if there were enough handlers to spare without undue attention. Work their way through the base. But no. 

Violence is the only option here.

They will wait until the host has consumed enough of this meal to make that initial burst of energy expenditure a harmless one, and then— 

Then it will be time to— 

There is a click of metal closing around the host’s arms, accompanied by a flood of terror— _oh_ shit _oh fuck oh shit I_ know _this no no no please_ —and a jolt of adrenaline so sweet and pure it almost hurts to absorb it all at once instead of savoring it. 

But absorb it they do because there is also a prickle of electricity as the metal bars above this chair begin to shift around and the chair itself moves. There is no time to determine what is happening—wiping seems to be what is happening, whatever that means—because electricity is fire is pain is danger is deadly is not on their agenda and so fuck these handlers the way they fucked the other researchers!

They will get no help from the host beyond the memory of searing white-hot fire and pain throughout its head and body—not helpful—and the adrenaline itself, which is such rich food that they luckily need nothing else from the host to twist their way through to the surface of the host’s body and expand to this host’s natural bonded form. So big. So hulking. What a nice host.

The manacles bite into their arms and legs for a mere breath of a moment before snapping apart, and then _they_ are snapping, also. Are snapping their teeth shut around the neck of the nearest torture-tester, are crunching the skull to hear _that_ snap as well. 

So much snapping going on.

And now so much yelling, screaming, shouting of orders. Such nonsense; all “don’t kill him,” and “take him down,” as if they could do either of those things now. Inconsequential noise. 

The much louder sounds of the— _guns_ , they pull from the host’s mind—of the guns going off, that is deeply unpleasant, but also ultimately not a concern. This host is eminently familiar with these sounds, loves these sounds, feels at home amid these sounds.

Down go two more handlers, these ones gobbled up whole to enjoy the adrenaline and its factories deeper within the torso. They are not as sweet, but are far from bitter. Stiff and floppy at once, like the others, but so, so terrified.

The flashing lights, red and orange, like fire, come with wailing shrieks of sirens, and they answer with their own shrieking, using the host’s knowledge of the room’s layout to pinpoint the devices making that awful noise and trying to shake them loose from their host. 

Handlers with guns and handlers with coats go flying from their path as they charge for the alarms, many of the handlers merely stunned and not dead—good for eating later—and others sadly dying on contact with the smooth rock walls of this base, impaled on the jagged metal bars of the wiping chair they have torn up, or just smashed against the floors with enough force to pop their skulls. 

Shame to waste such snacks. But there are many more, and they were in the way. 

They bellow their dismay at the handler that jabs at them with the electric stick and strangle it with the hose yanked from another handler who had tried spraying some sort of burning liquid at them. That handler gets eaten in short order. 

And then silence reigns as they smash the alarm and survey the room.

Lots of bodies, some groaning, some still. Lots of snacks, some deliciously living, some tolerably fresh. It will be a meal, even if not the one they had intended so early into their stay at this base.

 _We really_ are _going to eat them? We ate the other ones?_

It seems this host has discovered a way to communicate while they are in control. Interesting. They are far more used to a host ceding control and attention at once, forfeiting consciousness itself, in order for them to take over their collective form like this.

**Of course we are. Of course we did. They are delicious.**

_…I’ll take your word for it, I guess._

The ability to speak with this host even while in control could prove useful. Two minds are better than one, even one of them is damaged and empty. This host might be truly symbiotic with them.

All the same, the host’s thoughts are faint, drifting across their mind with a tentativeness that seems out of place. But there is no more adrenaline forthcoming, no more terror like that sparked by the chair. Likely because there is nothing to make it with now that the host is once more exhausted and temporarily depleted. 

Once again, the host must eat, and soon. This is too good a host to give up, too solid a match to allow the host to wither and die, not when there is a chance they could be equals, partners in their mission. The host insists that it doesn’t eat? Well. They will show their host how it is done. 

One of the snacks groans and tries to pull itself up out of a bit of rubble. It is one of the ones wearing the white coats. Excellent.

Yes. They will show this host what it is like to eat, and then the host will determine the food necessary to its biology. There is no time like the present.

**Eating is fun. Pay attention and you will see.**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content Warnings: In this chapter, there is some hinting at cannibalism, which is pretty in keeping with canon, regardless. So… canon-typical cannibalism? ^_^


	5. Getting Together

######  **SOLDIER:**

**— HYDRA base outside of Norilsk, Russia: Dusk, 16 June 1968 —**

He surveys the wreckage, impressed by the destruction despite his wounded pride at being shunted to the back of his own mind when there was violence to be conducted. Talk about indignity—he was made for violence and now has to sit back and watch? Tch.

The voice—Venom, more presence than voice, and very real based on all observations to date—wisely keeps its fucking mouth shut. Inside his head. That’s not going to stop being weird anytime soon.

Just like this prep room isn’t going to be useful for prepping much of anything anytime soon. Not him, not a mission, not him on a mission. Not him getting put away after a mission.

No more missions, really. No handlers to hand them out. Or to handle him. Not that he particularly liked that, but it was orderly, at least.

There is a computer screen still intact at the edge of a bank of them along one wall. It’s just about the only thing still intact in the whole prep room, and that includes what he could have called his life, such as it was.

The rest of the room is littered with solid metal safety rails bent and torn apart like they were plastic piping, or maybe tin, and chunks of concrete and ductwork scattered around like mulch on a garden. Except he doesn’t see much of anything growing from this particular mess. And mulch is supposed to help gardens grow, he thinks. 

Maybe. This Venom creature is right: Fuck if he knows anything about anything.

Even the padded swivel chairs some of the handlers sat in while working at the monitoring stations aren’t what anyone would call upholstered anymore.

 **Downholstered,** Venom supplies.

Now _who doesn’t know anything about anything,_ he thinks. _It’s called “unupholstered.”_

**That’s stupid. Up-holstered. Down-holstered.**

_Well that’s language for you. Sometimes the stupid word is the right one._

Language. That’s the thing he’s good at that isn’t also killing people. Language. A stupid, stupid thing to be good at in the grand scheme of things. Actually knowing how to make it in the world when you aren’t killing people—that’d be good to be good at. 

The grumbling in his mind about “unupholstered” slowly abates, though the sense of injustice about the word remains.

Well, the chairs have been mostly unstuffed, in any case. The bodies, too. 

He’s still not sure this “eating” thing is all that fun, but Venom had certainly had fun trying to convince him. And there’s a certain fun to be had in vicariously chewing and swallowing, he supposes. If it’s all the same, he’ll leave his strange new companion to it, though.

What was too dead to eat is now the only neat element in the entire prep room: A uniform stack of arms, a second stack of legs, an orderly pile of torsos, and a tidy pyramid of heads that caused a minor irritation when there was one less head than needed to give the pyramid a properly pointy peak.

So yeah. 

It seems pretty clear now that HYDRA no longer owns him. Because a lot of them are dead—everyone at this base who didn’t scramble out the emergency exits before tall, dark and glistening grabbed them and tore into them with teeth that have to be insanely sharp to get that effect. 

He knows sharp things, and those teeth? So sharp he itches to touch them. Except they’re… somehow also his teeth and he’s not around when they come out. Which he’ll have to bitch about later, when there are fewer urgent matters at hand.

He sort of wishes he knew what that looked like, though, when he gets tucked away and Venom does whatever it does to change them. He knows it’s taller because the angles are different, higher vantage point. And he’s seen through their eyes that both arms are coated in the same black goo that formed the writhing tentacle fetching rabbits and paddles earlier. 

He’s seen the claws that tip both hands. Handful of daggers, and very useful for tearing things up.

But the teeth… 

“Whelp,” he says aloud. “Guess I really _am_ yours, now.”

No point in thinking it since there’s no one around to overhear him speaking to… himself, he guesses. That’s what it’d look like, anyway. It feels pretty good to speak, actually, now that he’s had some opportunities to do it outside of a report delivery. 

Maybe that’s a perk of the situation. He loses every single familiar thing in one fell swoop and then has to die as this thing eats him from the inside out, but he also gets to talk the whole time.

 **I am** **_not_ ** **going to eat you. You are my host, not my dinner.**

“So far, I’m not seeing a huge difference in the outcome where I’m concerned.” As he makes his way to the computer terminal, he kicks at a piece of twisted metal that used to be the— 

The Chair. 

He swallows and moves on in a decidedly _not_ nonchalant manner.

Now that he’s remembered it, the wretched thing looms large in his mind, ready to obliterate everything about himself and replace it with vast stretches of emptiness. It still brings an unpleasant shiver up his spine, even powered down, torn to pieces and missing a technician to run it.

“The way I see it,” he continues, “you’ve eaten these people alive from the outside in, and pretty quickly. And I’m just going to get eaten a different way. A slow and unpleasant way. I know what organ failure feels like, you know.”

**You should not. Organ failure is not survivable for most.**

“Yeah, well.” He shrugs, and it feels good to do that, too, without someone to give him a nervous shove. “I’ve been through plenty of fatal things. I’m kinda used to it.”

**You are remarkably alive for someone who is used to fatal things.**

“Sure. So, anyway, eventually I’m gonna get feverish and semi-delirious again as you eat me alive from the inside, and then—” 

**_No._ ** **Now it is your turn to eat. You will regain the ingredients needed to sustain us both.**

“Sure there’s gonna be time for that?” 

Because he’s pretty sure the base is on lockdown right now—no one in, no one out—while some other base scrambles up a team to retake this base _and him_. Or to try, anyway. Venom might obliterate a number of them, but HYDRA is eternal and doesn’t take nicely to stretchy goo monsters hijacking their weaponry.

_**Goo monster?!** _

_Well, other than a name, I don’t have a lot to go on. So sue me._

**Apologize.**

Sure, whatever. “Sorry.”

Anyway, it doesn’t seem to leave a lot of time to find a pantry and raid it. Or a cafeteria. They should probably just be leaving, instead. It’s not like he knows where the kitchen even is. He knows the base _has_ those things, but he’s only ever been in certain sections of this place, and those ones weren’t on the list. And why should they be?

**We will make time to raid these places. Start now. Go.**

“What, _right_ now? We’re just going to leave all this shit scattered everywhere and not dig up a manual or a— a—” He gestures toward the computer terminal in front of him, with its single functioning screen and whir-clicking inner bit. “I don’t know, a how-to-person booklet? File? Something?”

 **You do not know** **_how_ ** **to person, but you** **_are_ ** **a person.** It’s kind of a question, even if it doesn’t sound like one. 

And to be honest, it’s a question he’s got, too, at the moment. Is he a person? Is he the Soldier? Is the Soldier a person? Just constantly stripped bare with the fire and ice of the chair’s electricity and the cryotube’s “rest” and then never allowed to remember anything?

Just how much has HYDRA fucked him over? What the fuck is he? _Who_ the fuck is he? _Why_ the fuck is he? He’s got the _when_ and the _where_ , but… hell, even the _how_ is kind of an unknown.

All the more reason to find a damn instruction booklet and see if he can reverse-engineer how to live without whatever shit they’ve been doing to him, provided he has the time to live that long without being devoured by Venom.

 **I** **_told_ ** **you. I will** **_not_ ** **eat you.**

_Sure._

Even with that many unknowns, there’s at least one good thing that comes out of this discovery about “wiping” and why he remembers so little: It finally makes sense to him why HYDRA itself has always given him a curling sensation of unease and disgust in the pit of his stomach.

**A stomach you will fill now. Books are not important.**

Because HYDRA isn’t a benevolent owner taking care of its weaponry. HYDRA is a group of wretched, evil science pricks, and he’s been their fucking science project the entire time, even when he’s not interesting. Shit, he always just assumed that he came in two flavors—useful and interesting—and that one flavor had it better than the other.

**Stomach, NOW! Books later.**

He reels from the reverberation through his skull and grabs some bit or other of the computer too hard with the metal hand, leading to yet more destruction as that chunk topples over with a crack. Fuck, guess Venom really can’t be ignored.

 **No, I** **_cannot_ ** **be ignored,** Venom says, sounding miffed as hell. **Neither can your stomach. You are hungry and need to eat, now. The books can wait.**

Tch, “hungry,” right. Whatever.

“Pretty sure they can’t, actually,” he says aloud, trying to see if the computer is still worth trying to get into. Yeah, the computer’s pretty dead, for all the thing had survived the earlier rampage, but there’s at least some papers and folders to comb through nearby. Some kind of book.

The Soldier, or whoever he is, gets started on that, grabbing the satchel with the files from his mission—might as well take that shit, too, since anything from that research facility will help him figure out what the fuck is going on with his passenger. 

“Look, I promise. This won’t take long and then I’ll try to eat before we go, but it’s more important than you understand. I need this information and so do you.”

He doesn’t ignore the mental grumbling, but he also doesn’t respond to it.

There’s nothing saying for sure that he’ll forget to come looking for some field notes or a personnel file—if he’s a person?—maybe a tech manual after looking for whatever pantry situation is going on and trying this eating thing on for size. 

But there’s also no telling how long they have to laze about before another HYDRA team is on the job, maybe with more of whatever it was Venom pitched an almighty fit about during the last scuffle that let him surface behind their shared eyes.

**Sound waves. There are frequencies and volumes that could kill me. Those “alarms” are very bad.**

Well. How about that. Just a bunch of noise. All the more reason to get them the fuck out of here. Before someone smart enough to figure that out comes blazing in with a sonic cannon.

 **Fuckity-fuck,** Venom murmurs, seeming to agree with the new priorities at the mention of a whole subcategory of weaponry specifically suitable for killing it.

This time he goes ahead and cracks a grin while digging through a filing cabinet and stuffing anything promising into the satchel. “You’re gonna overuse that and it’ll stop having any impact.”

**It is too fun to say to stop saying it.**

“Like bombs are too fun to set off to avoid them. Yeah, I get it.” He also gets a few promising documents in ancient, dog-eared file folders, including that battered old book with the red cover that looks eerily familiar and utterly foreign all at once in a way that is very, very promising.

He gauges the space he’s got left and pries open another drawer that’s been smashed shut. “Speaking of sound waves, though… Anything else we need to avoid?”

Venom takes a moment to think, an echoed sensation that weirdly makes him feel like _he’s_ the one making decisions about what to share.

 **Fire,** comes the eventual answer. **Other than that, I am invincible.** **_We_ ** **are invincible.**

“…Loud noises and fire.” He shakes his head and stuffs one last file in the bag. Invincible? Ha. “Hate to tell you this, pal, but those are pretty common.”

**Only because you place the C4 and press the button.**

_Oh-ho, still not over that, are we?_ So his hitch-hiker wasn’t overreacting to the fireworks, then. Interesting. But that didn’t seem to actually hurt it at all. Just maybe spook it. Maybe it was okay because of the distance?

“Well, I’m not stopping. Blowing shit up is fun and effective.”

**Dangerous and unnecessary.**

“Agree to disagree.”

**Not if you are going to keep setting very loud fire to things.**

“…I really _don’t_ plan to stop. You’re gonna have to live with that like I’m gonna have to live with sustained low-grade organ failure and borderline cannibalism.” 

Anyway, it’s not like he _asked_ for this. All he wanted to do was mercy kill a suffering lab rabbit. If this Venom wants on the ride, it’s gonna have to deal with the motion sickness. ‘Cause the ride ain’t stopping.

He gets the visceral impression of narrowed eyes, and is torn between wanting to laugh—has he ever done that?—and wondering whether there’s a level of rebellion against this new owner’s edicts that is the proverbial step too far and will make him more useful dead.

**…If the fireworks are far away. And you warn me first. Then we can agree to not agree at all.**

“Cool.” And yes, it _is_ cool. Give and take. More a partnership than any of the other associations he’s had. He could get used to that, if that’s what this is, and he lives that long. 

“I’d shake on it, but…” He shrugs. “I think your hands are my hands, probably, and I’m not shaking my own hand.”

There’s a sense of confusion, followed by an unnerving picking through his mind, like invisible fingers combing through his brain the way he’d just finished combing through the filing cabinets. 

“Gleugh, knock it off, that’s worse than the liver poking.”

**So empty in here.**

“Fuck you, too.”

A tentative cluster of tendrils slowly rises up, one black droplet at a time, from within the seams along the back of his metal forearm, and forms a knob at the end that peels out into a five-fingered hand like the one he’d seen before. An inky black arm… growing out of his own shiny metal arm. Huh.

The claws at each fingertip are as wickedly pointed as before, too, and the appendage widens to a bigger-than-respectable arm circumference, complete with bulging muscles and milky veins, though given the design of his arm, there’s not much room to talk about unnecessarily shapely muscles.

**Shake on it?**

“…Nice.” 

So, exactly like rifling through a filing cabinet if that filing cabinet is his brain filled—or not—with whatever facts he’s got stored up there that the… Chair… hasn’t managed to obliterate over the however many years he’s been in operation. Alive. In operation? Do both apply? Ah, fuck it. 

He reaches over with his right hand and gives Venom’s new hand a firm shake. “Pleasure doing business with you. That thing goes away again, right? Back where it came from? Inside?”

The arm slides back inside, seeping in through the seams it had previously dripped out of like an especially thick molasses.

**Now get to a pantry. We will eat everything.**

“I think you mean _I_ will eat everything.” Whether he wants to or not.

**I will help. You are still a baby. You might not understand at first.**

“Pretty obvious, pal. I think even a baby could manage it.” 

Really. There’s no place for that sloppy smugness oozing across his brain. The mechanics are simple Just put item in mouth, open and close mouth, move tongue around, careful not to bite self, swallow. Repeat until items are all too dead to be worth the effort.

How hard could it be?

* * *

It’s actually pretty fucking hard to eat, but not because of any sort of complicated mouth maneuvering. 

The hard part, as it happens, is finding the food in the first place.

He doesn’t have a blueprint this time, and the halls aren’t helpfully marked with instructions and labels for the various red-light-flashing corridors. In the research facility, everything lined up, even though he said it didn’t. Here… 

Where the fuck did they eat in here before Venom decided to eat _them?_ He knows they did. People do that, and these people can’t have spent every minute of their whole lives underground being evil science pricks with him as their plaything. They have to have taken breaks to eat.

At the very least, they took breaks to maintain the alarm system. Because even with the power to the lower levels cut, the alarms in every barricaded section go off as soon as they smash open the barricades.

First thing is always first: Target the hell out of each speaker and alarm, a task made far quicker with a bit of rifle action. The quickness of the rifle is the only reason Venom permits him to acquire one and keep it, and they’re going to have words about that once they’ve got time for arguments.

He only just found himself on the freedom side of the spectrum a couple of hours ago, and he’s not taking orders about how he can arm himself from a thing that doesn’t even have arms full time but has to create them when they’re needed.

So yeah, he’s got some C4 and a handful of fuses thrown in a tac bag, and a dozen grenades, and a few more guns and knives with plenty of ammo for the former. And it doesn’t matter that Venom is apparently bulletproof and they don’t need all this. 

Call it a safety blanket if that makes it any better, but he’s going to be fucking properly armed for exfiltrating what is now an enemy base and then going on the run. Even Venom’s got to sleep at some point, and—

**I do not. I only need you to hold up your side of the bargain.**

“Right. The bargain.” The part where Venom helps him kill every last HYDRA fucker on this planet while finding out who the hell he is, and he keeps Venom rolling in bodies and filled to the gills with whatever chemical nutrition it needs.

Not a bad bargain, all said, considering they struck it between disabling alarms and smashing down doors. It boils down to them wanting some of the same things out of life, including to keep on living it in relative comfort.

And speaking of comfort, he’s been a lot more active after this second round of feasting than after the first one, and hardly any of this organ failure is slowing him down. How the hell does that work? And can they make it work for them going forward?

**I am sustaining you. And am stronger now.**

“Right. Because you ate a lot of people today. But the first ones didn’t seem to do much, based on how you started fucking eating _me_ right afterward, and—”

 **You are not looking for a pantry.** A bit of black oozes down his arm as they come up on the next barricade, ready to smash it apart.

“Yeah, I know, I know. But I’m not putting it off. I know food is a high priority for you. I’m just wondering if we’re wasting our time here.” He obliterates another pair of alarms as soon as the blast door’s down. 

**Thank you.**

“No problem.”

**Food is not a waste of time.**

“Right, but this place is riddled with noise traps and surveillance, and kind of sparse on the food front, pal.” 

He scans the new hallway for signs of their quarry, and finds yet again nothing but doors to labs. He’s probably been here before, and inside a lot of those rooms, too. Who even knows what they did to him, or where. 

**If you would eat the bodies, then we—**

“That’s a big no.” He sighs and rubs at his eyes with his right hand. “You can eat all the people you want, but I think you’re right and I’m one of them. So I’m going to eat whatever people eat, not people themselves.”

A bit of static crackle comes through one of the speakers that is apparently not quite dead yet. He’s about to put another bullet through it when he realizes it’s calling in from another base, asking for an infil status.

Well, fuckity-fuck. He goes ahead and shoots it anyway.

“I vote we blow this base sky high on our way out, follow the road to the nearest town, stop at the nearest food place, and order the first four things on the menu.” That sounds right. Menus. Food places. Restaurants, maybe. Or cafes. Diners? Whatever they’re called. They have menus.

**Five things.**

“Okay, five things.” He sets about going back the way they came. He knows how to get out of the place, and that’s their goal now.

**And whatever else sounds good.**

“How the fuck am I supposed to know what ‘sounds good?’”

**If they have livers, then—**

“Fine. If they have liver, I’ll eat some, just for you.”

**And heads.**

“Nothing doing. I’ll eat two livers instead. Deal?”

**…Deal. Pleasure doing business with you.**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content Warnings: In this chapter, there’s some discussion of canon-typical cannibalism, which doesn’t seem to need a warning, but just in case. Also, the Soldier doesn’t yet have the correct pronouns for Venom (nor Venom for the Soldier, as we’ve seen), but they’ll be discussing that in future chapters.


	6. Five Times They Were Bonded… | First Times

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ack! I fell asleep before posting this chapter last night, so it's a day late. Sorry folks!
> 
> No content warnings are needed for this chapter (that I know of— let me know if I’m wrong and I’ll add one).

######  **SOLDIER:**

**— Moscow, Russia: Well after dark, 23 June 1968 —**

“Hey, question.”

**Always with the questions. Trying to fill up your empty head.**

“So what? It’s not like you mind.” For one thing, he’d feel it if Venom minded in the slightest, if he didn’t also hear about it in the back of his head at every possible opportunity—which is a lot of opportunities considering they somehow share a head. 

“It’ll just give you more to look at in there.”

**This is true.**

There’s a sense of expectation that he’s learned over the last several days on the run means to just go ahead with whatever he’s got on his mind. So sure, why not?

“This is the first actual roof over our heads we’ve found that comes with something like a working mirror, despite all the cracks. So—”

**That is not a question.**

“Shut it. I’m getting to the question, and you know it.” The Soldier examines his face in the mirror, all seven versions of it in the webwork of fractures across the glass. Fairly sharp jawline, plenty of stubble, some kind of divot in his chin. Lips pinker than he’d thought they might be.

He wonders if it’s the sort of face people remember or the kind that they forget. 

He kind of hopes it’s the former, even though being forgettable would work in their favor. Especially now that they’ve met people face-to-face and rented a room for the night with the last of their stolen money from the base so that he can finally try sleeping when they aren’t currently doing the running part of being on the run.

At least, when they’re not doing the running part for longer than about an hour. It’s doubtful they’ll spend a whole night in here. Not while being hunted down by people who know they need to stop for a night eventually and could use the opportunity to catch up.

He brushes a bit of hair out of his face, tucks it behind an ear, and then repeats the motion a few times, observing the difference between hair-hanging-in-face and hair-tucked-behind-ear. Impressive what a difference that can make appearance-wise. Add that to a new set of clothes, and it’s halfway to a disguise just changing the hair.

“I’m finally seeing what I look like,” he says. “I mean, my face and hair and things. My eyes.” They’re so fucking blue. Who knew? He could swear he’s seen eyes that are as striking a blue, but he can’t place where or when.

“It got me thinking. What do _you_ actually look like? I know the claws and tentacles and stuff, but— Your face. Your teeth. I want to see you like I’m seeing me.” 

And really, it’s hardly the first time he’s wondered about the teeth in this new weird life with literal live-in company. He was sort of wondering that from the first moment he realized there were teeth involved, or at least that’s the impression he has. He’s not great with the remembering things, after all.

They’ve eaten well, between the HYDRA outpost guards monitoring the base for their activity and the raiding parties gathered to take them down. And good thing they have, since it’s allowed them to keep going without more than an hour or so of rest here and there.

So he knows Venom’s mouth—or maybe _his_ mouth when Venom controls them?—is much wider than his own actual mouth could ever be without flat-out removing his lower jaw. But the teeth… 

And now that he sees his own eyes, blue-gray at some angles, blue at others, with so much detail in the irises, little loops and variations in the color, textures… How can he not wonder what Venom’s eyes are like? It’s an alien, apparently, direct from outer space via meteor or comet or something. Would it even have eyes like a human’s?

**Hmm.**

That’s curiosity if he’s ever heard it. But it’s pretty impossible that Venom wouldn’t know what it— 

Except _he_ hadn’t known what _he_ looked like. He’d seen some passport photos at some point, surely, but he can’t remember any details other than that there were passports he used on some ops and they had photos.

Maybe this is Venom’s first time seeing itself, too. Kind of a neat first to share, if a wretchedly depressing one.

He watches in the mirror as the fabric of his shirt near the small of his back seems to dampen and leak black threads into a loosely twined braid. The individual strands are farther apart this time, most of them not even touching each other, and leaving an empty space in the middle like braided nylon over a bit of cordage.

At one end: a system of wet-looking black roots anchored to his body. And at the other end: the answer.

Milky white paisley shapes form a shimmering pair of eyes in a glistening head that’s smooth all over, noseless, earless, and made of the same viscous black liquid that makes up the other appendages he’s sprouted since the research facility with the rabbits.

 **“Again with the rabbits,”** comes a voice that seems to echo in the room just like it echoes in his head, but wetter, though not quite full-on slobbery. **“I never want to see another rabbit.”**

The wetness to that voice makes sense given the saliva liberally coating the hundreds of needle-like teeth jammed into a gaping wide mouth directly beneath the white, swirling eyes. The lips are less defined than his own and more just a thin ridge where the skin ends and the bright gums and glistening teeth begin.

The Soldier watches the eyes with their slowly shifting edges. Watches the pointed red tongue creep out of that maw and just keep on creeping out farther than he’d have thought possible. Watches the surface of that face flowing liquidly along currents that cross over each other as the mouth opens wider and wider. 

The sides of Venom’s face open as his mouth does, following the lower outline of its curling eyes in a cross-hatched webwork of stretching black liquid and reddish gums, until the face is split almost exactly in half.

This, then, is the answer to how big Venom’s mouth is— As big as it needs to be. And its teeth— As many as will fit. Row upon row of them, all jammed in where they’d fit best and only loosely in rows, unlike his own compact single row. Some of them seem to be two-pronged, even.

He listens to Venom’s breathing, which sounds like the saliva is actually getting in the way as much as the tongue itself is, and then Venom shuts its mouth again, withdrawing that delicate and almost prehensile tongue and clicking those beautiful stiletto teeth together lightly.

 **“Well?”** Even with the mouth mostly closed, the voice is wetter externally than internally, that distinct salivating quality increased by at least twice. **“What do you think?”**

He lifts one side of his mouth in a half-grin. “What, you can’t read my mind and _tell_ me what I think like usual?”

**“I am being courteous.”**

Right. Courteous. Of course. As enchanting as this extraterrestrial goo-ball is to behold, there’s one thing that doesn’t apply and that’s courteous.

“Sure you are. You can’t tell what I’m thinking when you’re…” He shakes his head and settles on a description of this that’s at least close. “Out here. Like this.” 

He picks up a mental stomping of a foot, a wave of impatience washing over him. So at least some things still transfer, even if direct thoughts don’t. 

**“What do you think?”**

The Soldier reaches out to run a fingertip along Venom’s cheek. It looks wet, looks like black ink, or coagulating blood still liquid enough to glisten and shift even while it stiffens. But it feels dry enough while still being as slick as the teeth look with their liberal strings of saliva. 

He pulls his hand back and rubs his fingertips together. No residue, so the slippery feel is more smoothness and less slime. Almost like touching a wet snake rather than a wet eel, though he can’t recall actual instances of touching either. He must have at some point, though.

And then he touches one of the outer teeth, trailing a finger from top to bottom. So smooth, like a well-polished blade. And yes, slick with saliva that’s sticky and tingles, and that does leave a residue trail as his finger pulls away, until the strand stretches too far and breaks.

“I— Think you’re fucking gorgeous,” he says as he carefully wipes his finger off just in case Venom’s saliva is, well, venomous. What a masterpiece.

Those milky eyes narrow. **“** **Really?”**

“And not at all what I thought you’d look like.” 

But now that he sees Venom like _this_ , he can’t imagine any other way it’d look. Had he thought Venom would have ears? Had he thought a head like a squid’s, given the tentacles? Had he feared there was no face at all?

Hard to say. But this hollowed out mask of a face with the stunning contrasts of white on black with the redness of his tongue is just perfectly Venom. Between the claws and teeth and brutal strength, this is a being perfectly adapted to rending enemies and devouring them whole or in pieces. It’s a beautiful design.

“Well?” he asks, raising an eyebrow while he notes that Venom doesn’t have eyebrows. Just the eyes that curve around its head to take in everything in a given area. “What do _you_ think?”

**“I expected more screaming.”**

The Soldier laughs—it’s a thing he does now. He decided that yesterday. 

######  **VENOM:**

**— Moscow, Russia: Well after dark, 23 June 1968 —**

So far, after a span of time their host calls a “week” spent in near-constant travel, they have grown fond of it, not simply appreciative of the host’s suitability and resilience. 

The host knows the handlers who track them very well. Well enough to evade trap after trap, to set traps of its own, and to know when to move on and how long to rest. So far, this host has pushed itself beyond its limits with a fierce determination that resonates through their shared form, determined to live free or die killing its enemies.

Such an admirable stance to take in life. And so ruthless. A good, good match, not just physically, but… 

They shift around uneasily.

It is a terrible idea to become fond of one’s host. Hosts die, eventually, shrivel up and lose their chemical elasticity, even one as resilient as this one, if it keeps pushing itself like this. All of its organs at some point will stop producing the substances needed to sustain them, needed to sustain their bond, needed to sustain life itself.

And no one wants to mourn a host. That is something a loser would do. Something a loser would allow to happen.

But somehow, this host. It is different from the rabbit hosts. It is different from the other people they had briefly attempted to bond with and that failed almost on contact. This host is different even from the people that surrounded it.

There is a certain bloodthirstiness this host has, a relish for destruction—even if it is a loud and fiery destruction—that makes it have that little bit in common with them. 

And that appreciation for how pretty parts of this planet are. The fact that the host is fascinated with its own appearance, and not in a vain way. That it is almost enamored with theirs, instead of revolted or terrified.

They wonder if this host realizes how unique it is among hosts in the universe.

“You know I’m a ‘he,’ right?”

It is difficult to jump from deep inside a host, but they are startled enough to do it. **You are supposed to be sleeping.**

“It’s hard to sleep with you chattering about my spectacular attributes and inevitable shrivelling death.”

 **_And_ ** **you are** **_not_ ** **supposed to be able to eavesdrop on my thoughts. It is a one-way circuit.**

“Got bad news for you, pal.”

**Fuckity-fuck.**

“You want to come on out again and get some privacy? Might help me do this ‘sleeping in a bed’ thing, too.”

 **It** **_does_ ** **have a point…**

“‘He,’ thanks. What about you?”

**What about me?**

“Are you a he, like me? A she? Something else?”

Something else? He? She? What are… 

They go digging through the host’s mind again, looking for some clues as to what exactly all these words are about. Ah. There. Men and women, males and females, and an amorphous category currently termed “what if there are hundreds of options in outer space and no one ever knew?”

 **Something else,** they reply with confidence. They can be any of those things depending on the host they are bonded to. That seems to fit. It is the word with the closest meaning to how they think of themself. **They.**

_Holy fuck, are you plural? How many of you are in here with me?_

**Just me. Venom. There are many of us elsewhere.**

“But just you, singular, here inside my head,” the host says, sounding very relieved. “I’ve only got one of you.”

 **Inside your** **_everything_** **. But yes. You are mine, and you only have one of me.**

This is a first. A host that cares to find out more about the situation, about the bond, about them, than merely how to get rid of them. Perhaps there is a reason to be fond of this host, beyond the plump organs and steadily churning chemical factory that is its body. His body.

_I can still hear that._

**Fuckity-fuck.**

_And that._

**…You** **_do_ ** **have a point about my slipping outside for a time.**

They might as well. The Soldier has either seen enough things to be fearless or has a greater appreciation for the macabre than most hosts who had seen them embodying others or in their even more elastic unbonded form and fled if they were able.

This host… Might not mind them being physically visible. And tangible. Had reached out to touch them, twice. What a strange thought.

“You gonna do it, or what?”

They slip out through the host’s ribs and congeal into their external bonded form. **“You. Are a pushy host. It is like you have no self-preservation skills.”**

“Maybe they’re latent and only come out to play when I’m in actual danger.” 

**“Sleep.”**

The host sighs and shifts on the bed, a lumpy but largely soft thing propped up on four legs. “I’m so used to being upright. And hooked in place. And cold.” He makes a pointless gesture in the air. “I don’t like this.” 

**“You need to be hooked in place?”**

Another shrug. “Who the fuck knows what I need? We don’t even know for sure who or what I am.”

**“The Soldier. A person, a ‘he’ and an irritating host who will not sleep to restore his organs and energy levels.”**

“I told you, it feels weird to be lying down like this and—”

They twine a few appendages around the Soldier’s arms and torso. Form an arm with one of them to hold him tightly against the bed. Breathe out a huff of air. **“Now you are hooked in place. Try to sleep again.”**

The host tests the give of his new restraints and seems to find them acceptable. He nods and shuts his eyes. “Yeah, okay. Thanks, Venom. You’re a good space bug.”

Space bug?! How _dare_ — Except it sounds… fond? A term of endearment and not an insult? Is the host… fond of them?

**_“_ …** **_Apologize!”_ **

Their host laughs out an apology and wraps his arms around Venom’s arm around his waist, holding it as tightly as it holds him.

It is new, it is weird, it is different… 

…And it is nice. 

Fuckity-fuck.


	7. Five Times They Were Bonded… | Coffee Shop

######  **SOLDIER:**

**— Bern, Switzerland: A little after 8 A.M., 23 September 1968 —**

**And five of the scones.**

“And can I get five of the cinnamon scones, please?” he asks, ignoring the sigh behind him. “To go, same as the rest. Thanks.”

The lady behind the counter doesn’t even raise an eyebrow at the addition to his order. And why should she? He’s gotten dozens of other things, wiped out her entire selection of chocolate pastries, and has shown only a few signs of bringing his order to a conclusion any time soon.

He’s sure the people behind them in the lineup have quite a few raised eyebrows between them.

**Admit it. You want to eat the scones as much as I want to eat the people in line.**

Okay. Sure. He’ll admit it, but only because he’s feeling generous. The things look good in the case, all dusted with sugar and swirled through with cinnamon. He looks forward to dunking them in a bowl of melted butter and then a bowl of sugar, and enjoying the even sweeter results. All of which they have back at their borrowed hotel room.

 _And while I’m being so generous,_ he thinks at his unseen passenger, _I’ll admit that eating is damn fun and definitely a priority I don’t mind._

**Told you so.**

_Yup. You_ do _keep telling me so. Several times a day._

 **Eating is good several times a day. And I** **_did_ ** **tell you so.**

“Thanks, ma’am,” he says with a nod as he gathers up his change and his parcels and deposits the latter one by one into the duffel bag he came in with. 

The other customers lined up behind him shuffle a bit, but no one feels like it’s worth it to mutter about him ordering the whole display case or anything like that. 

Maybe it’s the time of day. Maybe it’s the fact that he’s somewhat physically imposing without trying, even when looking like someone else entirely via a bit of alien camo technique he still doesn’t understand, but which is convenient as hell for disguising a metal arm.

Either way, it gets him out the café door with merely two-thirds of the items in the display case and no trouble. 

No trouble at all, just how he likes it.

Venom, of course, thrives on trouble, particularly trouble of the edible variety. But here they have pastries, glorious pastries, and those outweigh finding new trouble before they clean up their current batch.

**Think she will remember us?**

“Hope so,” he mutters under his breath as he adjusts duffel and jacket collar. Kind of chilly this morning, though the cold doesn’t bother him, anyway. Nothing like the cold of cryo—or the cold of icebergs, which is apparently where Venom spent the last several hundred years. 

“We cleared out her morning’s sales pretty quick, and the sign says she’s only open while supplies last.”

**She will go home early and enjoy the free time.**

“Maybe. Who knows?”

**We could know.**

“Do we _want_ to know? Does it matter?” He turns a corner and shifts his stance to match their current target’s general gait. No sense in posing as a dead man when you don’t actually pose as the dead man.

“We’ve got shitty hotel coffee waiting for us and a duffel bag full of delicious pastries and chocolates. That’s about all I care about.”

 **You care about a lot of things,** **_Soldier_** **.**

“We’re trying on Nikolas this week, remember?” He sidesteps a woman coming toward him from the hotel pushing a stroller, careful to keep the duffel from bumping woman or stroller. “You could help a guy out.”

She looks over her shoulder at him as they pass each other, a quizzical frown on her face.

**I like Soldier better. It is what I am meant to be, too.**

“You’re trying to take over the planet for your friends who boss you around and call you a loser. That’s not what a soldier does.”

The woman walks _much_ faster, and then crosses a street. He wonders what room she’s in, or if she actually lives in the area. He hasn’t seen her around these past few days, and a stroller indicates she’s based close by. Maybe she’ll recognize them, too. 

**Are you** **_sure?_ ** **You’re the Soldier, and your handlers bossed you around and claimed you were not even a person.**

“…Point. Bit harsh, though.”

 **Bit true~ though.**

Oh, the fucking smugness in their alien voice. If Venom had a face at the moment that wasn’t the Soldier’s own face—or, well, Nikolas’s face—he’d glare at it.

“Stop being mean, you creepy fucker.”

The doorman turns a scandalized look in his direction. “I _beg_ your pardon?”

“Oh, yeah, no. Not you. I got—” He waggles his fingers at his ear and shifts the pastry duffel on his shoulder. “Voices.”

That scandalized look doesn’t go away—excellent, another person who will recall their guy returning to the hotel room all alive and whatnot—but the doorman waves them through to the lobby all the same. 

Good thing Nikolas is checking out today. Someone might be by to check on him before they’re ready to vacate.

**You do not have voices. I am only one voice.**

_Hey, I got a voice, too. I count._

**Well, when you put it that way.**

He nods at the front desk agent. “Room 338.” 

“Certainly sir.” She fetches Nikolas’s key and hands it over. “And are you still checking out today?”

He nods again. Doing a lot of nodding today and it’s still morning. Sheesh. “Yes, before noon. I’ll come down to settle the balance on my way out. I might require room service before then.” They’ve required a lot of room service over the last few days.

“Of course. I hope you’ve enjoyed your stay.”

“ _Immensely_ , yes.” 

It’s been nice to have people bring food to him at all hours of the day and night, and he’ll be sad to see this place in the rear view mirror, so to speak. But needs be. Nikolas’s people will get suspicious if they extend his stay past what was originally agreed on. No sense raising those suspicions too soon.

After a pleasantly empty elevator ride and a short walk down the hall, the morning’s tasks are complete. Finally. He keys into the room, closes and locks the door behind him, scans for any changes since they left, and settles into the chair. 

The ripple over his face and down to his toes tells him he’s finally wearing his own face again, and he takes a moment to survey Nikolas’s room, good old 338, complete with the wardrobe, personal effects and research notes of the dearly departed Nikolas Hämäläinen.

Or to be more specific, _Dr._ Nikolas Hämäläinen, head researcher in charge of studying Specimen A40-3BK, alias The Creature, real name Venom.

######  **VENOM:**

**— Bern, Switzerland: A little after 10 A.M., 23 September 1968 —**

“Well,” their host says after swallowing the last of the pastries and flipping the file folder shut. “I think we have everything we’re going to get from this haul, V.” 

The Soldier leans back in the chair, balancing it on the back two legs as he licks a few croissant crumbs off his fingertips. The satisfaction and enjoyment of eating vicariously through their host is almost as good as devouring people themself, though they still can’t wait for their next target.

It is good, very good, that the host has taken to eating so quickly and so well. Almost as if he was made to do it. Ha. They should tell him so even more often.

 **I agree** , they say instead. It’s true. The host has gleaned everything from the files that is of importance, and they have their next steps. Now for the other side of their mission. **It is your turn now. Back to Russia?**

“Ehh.” The host flips through the red book on his lap. “Someone put my guys on your guy’s trail. I say we grab whoever that was and do us both a favor by cutting the connection.”

That is logical enough. Their host thinks of things in very logical ways. Yet another reason he makes such a good host. If there is information exchange between their respective former captors, then there could be even more danger in any traps they spring.

The Soldier taps a page toward the front of his book. “Then we go looking in Ukraine. There’s an old auto factory mentioned up front. Might still be around.”

Auto factory. Large building where they make cars like the ones they have stolen while traveling. They have learned so much about this planet now that they are out living in it. Living in their host, that is, who is living in it. 

The book has a lot of information, including lists of words that they have now memorized in many languages and are on alert to block out. This host is _theirs_ and no one else’s. They will not allow any such interference in their bond. How considerate of the handlers to write it down in a book.

The opening pages in particular, before the lists, have a Ukrainian slant to the language, according to their host. And it does make sense to start at the beginning. They and their host have many years to complete these preliminary missions before they have to consider population harvest and signaling to their team lead.

“Tch,” their host interrupts. “We both know you aren’t going to do that. They insulted you and are nowhere near as fun as I am. Plus, they want to destroy it all, and you think it’s pretty. You’re lyin’ to yourself, sweetheart.”

 **I am not lying. Not to me, not to you. Some day…**

Except they _are_ lying, and to both of them. 

Fuck their team lead, fuck their long-term mission, fuck planetary takeover, depletion and harvesting. Why _subjugate_ a planet and kill all of its people when you can _travel_ the planet, enjoying what it has to offer and very sustainably eating a select few of its people?

“Right, exactly.” 

Their host closes the book with a thump. “Well, we already know I was found at the bottom of an icy ravine,” he says. “That’s where they got the idea to store me in a fucking freezer, according to page 63 in the ‘Proper Storage of the Winter Soldier’ section.”

Oh, the bitterness running through those thoughts and words. As bitter as the coffee this hotel serves before they melt the chocolates into it and dust it with the sugar and pour in the milk.

“But this whole damn book is silent about who the Winter Soldier even is, or was, or who they found in that ravine.” 

**The book is silent about everything. It is a book.** Silly host, with his turns of phrase.

The Soldier rolls his eyes. “We can raid random HYDRA bases and look up mission reports to find out what I did as the Winter Soldier under HYDRA’s command any time we want. But if I want to find out who I am—and I do—then I need to know who I was.”

**And so we go to the factory. With the cars. And we see if they know who you were.**

“Then we go to the factory with the cars, and we probably find out it hasn’t made cars in decades, and is actually a HYDRA front full of manuals on how to turn a person into an empty-headed killing machine.” 

**And then we eat them all.**

“Fuck yes. And then we eat them all.”

Oh, this is a good host. So good.

But first, they have to arrange the scene, get the correct files safely stowed away, scatter the other files about, open up the window, call for room service… 

Yes. The world will know—and those researchers will know—that their quirky scientist is dead and gone. But there will be no body; only blood and signs of a struggle. Their host’s idea, that.

If there is a body, then people can trace how a person died and use it to find out who killed him. Their host knows all about that. Leave only the traces you want, none of the traces you do not. Plant the clues that tell the story _you_ want to tell, especially if the story is a lie.

The handlers taught him that and then failed to take it away again. The handlers’ failure is _their_ gain, though.

Dr. Nikolas Hämäläinen checked into this hotel looking tired, haggard, perhaps a bit hunted. Check.

 _Because we_ were _hunting him._

Yes. Hunting him down and then eating him. So delicious. Like a pastry—crispy and fat, with a sweet spot of soft goo in the middle to ooze out. 

_Well, at least they waited to wax poetic until after I’d finished the danishes._

Hmm. The host’s thoughts are leaking more than usual as he arranges the scene. Or perhaps theirs are leaking and the host is picking them up. Are they becoming even more tightly bonded with time and travel?

Regardless, poor, haggard Dr. Nikolas Hämäläinen settled into his room, made himself comfortable, was pleasant and charming. Dr. Nikolas Hämäläinen ordered a lot of room service. Such a hungry man. Check.

Dr. Nikolas Hämäläinen behaved a bit erratically, ordered mostly meat and chocolate, regularly went out with an empty duffel bag and returned with a full one. Dr. Nikolas Hämäläinen was seen ordering pastries, muttering about aliens, saying that he had voices. Check, check, check.

“Yes, I’d like to place a room service order. Room 338. Yes. Same as last time, thank you.”

Dr. Nikolas Hämäläinen ordered one last meal from room service. Check.

And then Dr. Nikolas Hämäläinen vanished, disappeared entirely, leaving only a bloody mess, papers flapping in the breeze from the open window, and a door left ajar for the room service staff, who will make their discovery.

Poor room service staff.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content Warnings: None needed this chapter (that I know of— let me know if I’m wrong and I’ll add one).


	8. Five Times They Were Bonded… | Didn’t Know They Were Dating

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We're starting to skip ahead in time a bit more now; if there's anything you'd like me to fill in (such as the first bite of chocolate), let me know in the comments or on Tumblr and I'll see about jotting out a little extra snippet!

######  **SOLDIER:**

**— Kiev, Ukraine: Late Afternoon, 07 February 1969 —**

“Nice place you got here,” he says, kicking a toe lightly into their current target’s side. “Mind if we stay a while?”

There’s a bit of muffled pleading and a bit of mental laughing, but the Soldier goes ahead and ignores both. He doesn’t recognize the guy from any of the fuzzy memories that have been surfacing over the past few months, but he knows him from the files well enough. 

Here lies Mikail Gregorovich, his very own brown paper package tied up in string. Well, duct tape, anyway, but he’s wearing a brown coat, and that counts. 

He hums a few bars from the song as he rifles through the bookshelves. When the dog bites, indeed. This past seven or so months have been one long string of this dog going after his masters. 

**Hiding from them, mostly.**

“Biding our time and striking with purpose.” And hiding, yes, but who could blame them? Strike at the opportune moment and be nowhere in the area at an inopportune moment. That’s how you survive when you’re one person and a live-in alien guest up against a sprawling shadow organization that’s trying to run the world and succeeding to an alarming degree.

**Pussy.**

“Practical.”

**What are we wasting time pulling on books for? We could be eating this man’s head.**

“One of these books isn’t going to move when I go to pull it out.” At least, according to his sources. And then he’s got all the access in the world to all the files from that auto manufacturing plant.

**Soldier manufacturing plant.**

“Yeah,” he says. “That, too.”

**And when the book does not move, we can eat him?**

“When I get through all the files and find what I want, we can eat him.” He continues to ignore the muffled sounds behind him as they intensify. Guess it does sound awful from where dear Mikail is lying. “We might still need to get some information from him.”

 **Information,** Venom scoffs. **Spleen, heart, liver. Eyes, lungs, pancreas… So much more important than information.**

He comes to the end of that shelf and starts on the next, like gnawing off row after row of corn. There are a lot of ears of corn in this library. He hopes he doesn’t have gnaw every one to find the one kernel that opens up the corn field beyond.

“Something tells me his pancreas isn’t going to contribute much to finding out who I am.”

**But it will contribute very much to me.**

“In due time, pal. In due time.”

The current book fails to so much as twitch when he tries to tip it out with his finger, but instead opens the entire case with the smoothness of a well-greased set of hinges when he pushes it forward. 

Bingo.

**We still need to play that and find out why that word means what it means.**

“I don’t think we’re old enough to do that, yet. Or we don’t look old enough.”

**After this. We will play bingo. I will make us look old.**

“Sure thing.” He shrugs. “Anyway, looks like you’re in luck on the dinner front, buddy.” 

The Soldier turns around to grab the flashlight and crouches down near their target’s head. “Not you. Your luck is still pretty shitty. Might even’ve gotten shittier just now.” 

He pats the guy’s head. “Back in a jiff!” 

* * *

A jiff ends up being quite a while longer than he’d thought, since the bookcase doesn’t open up into a room with a safe, but into a series of narrow steps and then into a cellar.

The house itself is locked up tight, and the target is tied well enough that he’s not concerned about escape. Plus, he’s already fished out that cyanide tooth to ensure Venom gets their treat alive and squirming.

**I do like it when they squirm. The fear enhances the flavor. The adrenaline.**

“Well, we probably need to haul the salient stuff upstairs and go through it after you eat, anyway. Don’t want him running out of steam or anything.”

**Exhaustion can be tasty, too. And you are supplying a lot of adrenaline now.**

“Glad to hear it, I guess.”

In any case, it’s not fear adrenaline but excitement. This place is full of files. Dusty cabinets and records boxes line the walls, even a little projector with some slides. It’s not a whole factory’s worth of data, but it’s clearly the cream of that data crop, moved here for safekeeping when they shut the factory down.

If there is anywhere the initial files can be found, it’s here. This room, stuffed with dust and information, can give him a name. An identity beyond merely what they made him into. It’s here. Somewhere. He just has to find it.

**What will happen then?**

He stops partway into opening a filing cabinet drawer. “What do you mean, ‘what will happen?’ I’ll find out who I am, that’s what’ll happen.”

**After you know. How will that change anything?**

He hadn’t exactly thought that far ahead. Hadn’t thought he really needed to. But there’s a prickle of concern to Venom’s statements, an undertone of worry for the future. He’s tempted to brush that off as needless, but neither of them are all that commonly caught up in needless things. Everything has a reason and a purpose.

 _What are you getting at?_ And why can’t he ask that aloud?

 **You are who you are** **_now_** **. Not what they made you, but what** **_you_ ** **made. With me. We are Venom.**

“Well, yeah,” he says, glad his voice is cooperating again. “That doesn’t change. We don’t change. Hell, you’re not even killing me anymore. Why would I try to get rid of you?”

**Just making sure.**

He squints at the label on the drawer. 1940A. Promising. Probably just a bunch of bullshit about cars, since he can’t possibly be that old. But still. Start at the beginning.

“Can a host even get rid of you once you’re established?” He opens the drawer and pulls out the first file. “I mean, I won’t. I don’t want to get rid of you. I kinda like all this. But _can_ they?”

**It is difficult. And many hosts are too weak, even if they are strong enough to last. A host who is a good match will last, but the match is too good to break the bond so easily.**

“…Good. That means we’re really tightly bonding and it’ll be hard for them to split us up if they do catch us.”

He catches the wordless wave of relief and a hint of smug denial—that they could ever be caught, pah!—that washes over him, and grins. 

“You got it, sweetheart.”

The first file is titles, deeds, government certificates, blah, blah, blah. Official founding stuff. Blueprints—and don’t those give him a mental flash of bright lights and concrete walls and grinning eyes behind glasses.

He shoves that file aside and reaches for the next, the next, the next, flipping through them with a bit of speed, since they’re all unlikely to be applicable.

Car stuff, makes and models, part numbers. Renovation and machinery. New operation moving into part of the space. Whatever. Boring. Possibly of interest later, but not now.

Yet more cars, the new operation moving back out of that part of the space, more renovations, ugh. Maybe he should have started at 1960A and worked back if he needed to.

**You still could.**

“Eh, I’m already half done with this drawer. Then I’ll skip ahead a few years.”

A few years of cars, more cars than even an auto factory should have in its records. And safety statistics, and so many fucking government forms, and pensions, and pay slips, and— 

He grabs the file with a shaking hand. The Winter Soldier Project. Holy fucking fuck, this is it. The first actual information on record anywhere about… him. Not including whatever records must be on file for him under a different name. 

Or a name at all.

He swallows.

**I still think Soldier is a good name.**

It’s not smug, for once. More reassuring than anything else, like Venom’s trying to tell him it’s okay if he turns back now, that he doesn’t have to have a name someone else gave him, but can pick his own.

“It’s a codename,” he whispers, looking at the file and still not quite managing to open it. “Codename: Winter Soldier. Real name: I don’t know.”

**Real name: Venom. We can both be Venom. It is a good name, and we are good together, and names do not have to mean anything.**

He huffs out a laugh. “Singing a different tune from day one, aren’t we?”

 **The song ha** **s changed.** There's a mental shrug. **Open the file, then. If you want to know, then I want to know who you** **_were_** **, especially since who you** **_are_ ** **will not change.**

He opens the file. 

  
  


######  **VENOM:**

**— Kiev, Ukraine: Later Afternoon, 07 February 1969 —**

“My name is… Bucky…” their host murmurs, staring at the one incredibly boring page from the current file folder. 

Their host sounds like he has made a truly momentous discovery in the portion of the file composed of nothing but words and a tiny photograph of a version of himself with short hair and a stupid hat.

They are surrounded by papers of much greater interest. Page after page full of detailed surgical photographs. Blueprints for five different versions of their host’s inorganic arm, each one accounting for less and less of a bone to anchor it to, the last of which reveals a scaffolding of inorganic implants to attach it to.

Their host has even more in common with them, it seems. Torture-testing for years upon years. Found in a place full of ice after a great fiery fall—though the fire part of that is an assumption on their own part. And a name, except… 

**Bucky is stupid, like the hat you were wearing then. I like Soldier better. You do not wear stupid hats.**

Irritation flows through their connection, along with a hint of relief. “Fuck _you_ , pal. I’m gonna be Bucky or you’re gonna be… Blobby.”

 **I am** **_Venom_** **. You would not call me Blobby.**

“Blobby B. Blobsmith Jr.,” their host replies. “Not even the original Blobby; just a copy of your father.”

Father. A peek into their host’s steadily growing repertoire of understandings reveals this to mean progenitor. A copy of their progenitor, which is surprisingly not at all far from a thorough understanding of the— 

“Mother named Blabbersnoot,” their host continues. “Sisters Baklava and Balaklava.”

Wait. But that is not even close to a thorough underst— 

“Brothers—”

**You can be called Bucky.**

“I know. Because I _am_ Bucky.” Their host touches the tiny photograph with the stupid hat again, running a fingertip along its surface in wonder. “I’m… Bucky. James… Buchanan… Barnes. It says so, right here.”

**Too many names. First you have none, and then you have too many. And you had better not acquire a stupid hat.**

“I like the one in the middle the best. Buchanan.”

**Like canon. More exploding things and fire. Typical.**

“So sue me. I like fireworks and other things that go bang. You like heads and mushy liver. We all have our thing, pal.”

**I like being pal.**

“…Yeah. I like that, too. I feel like… Maybe I had a pal? Earlier. Someone I forgot.”

Sadness. Sadness for the pal that was lost, sadness for not remembering the pal that was lost, sadness that the pal _is_ lost. Sadness that the handlers took the pal away from him. Sadness that he let them.

Unacceptable. It is unwise to get emotionally attached to one’s host, it’s true. But they will not let this host be sad for long. And not guilty-sad for being unable to stop the handlers. They will need to reacquire the pal. It will need to be their next mission.

**We will find your pal, and we will eat anyone who tries to stop us.**

Their host makes the huffing noise that is laughter and not laughter all at once, the short laugh that is usually painful somewhere inside that is not physical and cannot be reached or healed. He holds up the file and makes a pointless gesture with it that is meant to be meaningful. 

Sensation of formal agreement, military greetings, compliance with superiors. “Salute,” they gather from their host’s mind. 

“Bon appetit, buddy.”

They send back a flood of approval and glee, and extend a fist from their host’s side. This is a thing they do now. It is meaningful without being pointless, a way to add a physical connection while they are otherwise already fully bonded. 

**Bon appetit, Bucky.**

Their host bumps their fist with his own fleshy organic fist and grins. There is sadness in his eyes and in the back of his mind, but it is already being eclipsed by determination. 

A perfect, and perfectly resilient, host. With a good appetite, both for food and for revenge. 

Now, to get a little of their own back… 

**Now that we know who you are, we can meet your family.**

“My… family?” Their host’s grin falters. “Uh. To be honest, I didn’t even think about there being a family.”

**You thought about mine.**

“Yeah, okay, I teased you about names, but a family? An actual family? For— Me?”

This was not the intended outcome of returning the joke. Their host is rattled. Time to put things right.

“It stands to reason I came from somewhere,” their host mutters softly, “but…”

**Your progenitor, yes. Maybe there are other tier-adjacent offshoots and not just yourself.**

That will do the trick. Throw off the current line of thinking and make it about themself. They are Venom, they are strange, they are an alien, yes. They will focus on that for a while now, and their host will not be sad and rattled.

“Wow, ‘tier-adjacent offshoots,’ huh? You’re really leaning into the alien thing right now, aren’t you?”

Fuckity-fuck. Of course their host knows the routine. But they will continue all the same.

**Perhaps your progenitor is named Blobby, and gave you Bucky as a name. Bubble and Bobble and Babble for tier-adjacent offshoots. You are the weird one with the weird K name. You are the loser in the lineup.**

“Gee, thanks. That’s really sweet of you to point out.”

**I am a very sweet person.**

Their host laughs again, but this time it is the longer laughing, the amused laughing, the laughing that makes the best sound, almost like a wheeze.

“Sure you are, sweetheart. The sweetest. That’s why I call you that. You’re just like a puddle of molasses.”

**You are taking the joke too far, Bucky.**

“No I’m not. You’re very sticky and elastic and pretty dark, all told, and—”

**I am certain Bobble would be a better host than you.**

“Rude.”

**Hungry. Go back upstairs so we can eat our dinner.**

* * *

“You know…” their host says a few hours later, after they have eaten their target and also their target’s dinner. 

The target this time around was so kind as to supply an entire tank full of delightful morsels called tropical fish, though they saw nothing tropical about them. Also a slab of dead cow in the refrigerator. And some beer.

 **“I do know. I know everything you know.”**

It is not the truth, and they both know it. Especially partially outside their host like this, they do not know everything their host knows, but only faint impressions of the way their host feels.

But their host is sounding pensive again, and that is not good before trying to sleep, even if they are still working on the dessert the target provided: something sweet and puffy called marshmallows that transform in this fireplace into flavorful sugary cinders complete with molten insides.

“Venom, come on. I—” Their host, their Bucky, feeds another log to the fire.

**“You.”**

“Shut it. You know I’m getting there.” 

A marshmallow comes sailing toward them, which they promptly snap up. Ah, banter. Playful mutual feeding with a host. Unheard of. Their team lead would be appalled. 

**“What is it you are getting to?”** they ask, careful to sound as genuinely curious as they are. Partially split like this, their host is a mystery in some ways. And usually interesting to solve.

“It’s just that— I kind of _do_ mean ‘sweetheart.’ When I say it.” 

Their host shoves another three marshmallows on the fireplace poker he found hanging beside the other iron tools. He doesn’t feel nearly as hesitant as he sounds. He feels like he wants to say it all faster and is holding himself back. 

“I mean, you’re not sweet in the slightest, but neither am I. It’s just that I’m… really fond of you.”

Hmm. Perhaps they, also, should say things slowly, to match their host’s way of conveying this information? This does not, at least, seem to be a revision of the earlier conversation about hosts and symbiotes splitting apart.

 **“…I am fond of you.”**

Yes. They will pause here. Mimic their host. Eat a marshmallow from the bag, even though it is not gooey and crispy yet. 

**“And not merely because you are so delicious to nibble on and so very eager to feed us both.”**

Their host smiles, a brilliant thing with plenty of teeth. “You’re a bloodthirsty asshole who wants to eat the planet.” There’s another pause, this time to sandwich the marshmallows between two chocolate bars. “And I think I might _like_ you. A lot.”

Bucky breaks the bars apart and offers them half of the squishy, melty, delicious results.

They grin in turn after eating their half in a massive, eager bite, letting their teeth part and the tip of their tongue protrude to lick each needle-sharp one of them, even though they do not need cleaning. 

**“You are bloodthirsty. You are an asshole. You eat dead animals.”** They pause, since that is the way to do this, apparently. **“And I** **_do_ ** **like you. A lot.”**

“Yeah?” Their host’s cheeks flush a slight pink shade, but nothing leaking across their bond hints at distress of a physical or emotional nature.

It is time to be honest with their host and themself, and to say it aloud. It has not been a full trip around the flaming ball of misery that is this system’s sun, but they have grown fond of this host, have bonded too closely to allow anything to happen to break them apart. And their team lead, their mission, that will be the end of Bucky.

**“I am not going to send a signal to my team lead. I do not want to harvest this planet and move on to others. I want to stay here on this wretched inhospitable ball of oxygen and fire. With you.”**

Their host strokes their face just under their eye. “And I’m not going to stop hunting down HYDRA. I’m not living and letting live. They’re all going to die. I want to be with you when you eat every last fucking one of them.”

**“Then it is settled.”**

“Deal, sweetheart.” 

**“I like being sweetheart even more than pal.”**

They extend an inky fist in their Bucky’s direction and are surprised when instead of bumping it with a fist of his own, their host twines their fingers together.

“Aw. Now who has too many names?”

**You. Still you.**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content Warnings: Maybe canon-typical cannibalism? Honestly, though, none needed this chapter that I know of— let me know if I’m wrong and I’ll add one.


	9. Five Times They Were Bonded… | Presumed Dead

######  **BUCKY:**

**— National Museum of American History, Washington D.C.: Just before closing time, 02 November 1969 —**

He lets out a long breath and pushes his chair away from the table, trying to keep his own personal wave of grief from rolling over his partner as well. 

So that’s it, then. Data recovered, mission at a dead end, news irrevocably bad.

Almost a year chasing down his pal, looking through his files for any hint of someone he’d worked with regularly, a handler who wasn’t a complete jackass, a scientist who was kind, a fellow operative, anyone.

He’s learned a lot about his time as the Winter Soldier from poring over HYDRA’s records. And a lot about HYDRA itself, what it stood for, where it came from, what their goals were— And are.

And before. Looking for family, like Venom had so kindly suggested— Dead and/or moved away without leaving any trace. Military records, starting at the beginning because why not?

No pal, just scads of young recruits he’d apparently trained up and lost on the front. No one really stood out, no one was more than a name and a photo. 107th. Sure. Might as well be 12th for all it meant to him.

Azzano, Italy meant something to him. It meant fear and determination not to let anyone else die on the field. It meant surrender to save his company, meant telling his team to stand down when he was the highest ranking soldier still standing after volleys of some heinous vaporizing cannon fire. But while those were his boys, they weren’t his pal.

And Kreischberg meant something. Meant marching. Marching to Kreischberg with guns trained on their backs, hands on their heads even if it meant tripping would send them to the ground without their arms to steady themselves. Marching into circular cages, barred pits under a walkway, crammed in like cattle. But his cagemates were not his pal.

And Zola meant something. Zola was in the records, too, the Winter Soldier records, not Sergeant Barnes’s military file. Zola meant pain and fear, more pain and more fear. Needles and burning and bright lights. Zola meant trains, for some reason. 

Zola was still alive somewhere. And he was emphatically not his pal.

He reaches down to caress the black and white keychain fob on his belt, just a fingertip along the top, between the white paisleys that form Venom’s eyes. 

He wishes Venom weren’t out acting like a bauble on a keychain right now. Wishes he were fully inside their body, able to share everything, to shoulder some of this discovery. Wishes he were encased completely by Venom and doing some fine dining in a Wall Street back room filled with human sharks who’d prey on the weak.

But this is a library, and they’ve gotten kicked out of libraries before for making noise. It’s just talking, but by now he’s so used to just speaking his mind that it feels unnatural to think at Venom when he can actually say things.

Better it’s like this, really. Even if he wishes there weren’t a need for it.

Because the pal, they discovered earlier in the fall, is Steve Rogers. Was Steve Rogers.

Steve Rogers, once he had the name to work with and a photo to look at, Steve Rogers meant rescue and salvation. Meant hope and hilarity. Meant friendship deeper than the bedrock of his being. 

Just looking at the photo in that kid’s textbook, he’d known. He’d have done anything at all for Steve Rogers. He’d have gone to war for him, and did. He’d have stayed at war for him, and did. He’d have died for him, and did. Somehow.

The files about his death are all too classified to be here or in any other library he’s got access to. Well. Legal access.

But along with the name, and along with the photo, there’d been the lie: _Steven Grant Rogers, 1918 - 1945, presumed dead._

But that was in a history book for some kid’s US History class. History books lie. They lie all the time. That’s what makes them history books: someone telling their version of things and brainwashing all their descendants to buy into the lie.

The same book said he was missing in action, presumed dead. And was he? Hardly. He’s never been more alive.

But _now._

It’s one thing for a high school history textbook to lie about this. Adults everywhere seem to think kids everywhere need protection against hard truths and dirty secrets. But this is the National Fucking Museum of American History. It’s the goddamn Smithsonian Libraries research wing.

He had to wait for permission to even get into this library, to get into this collection of classified files. Had to check in to even get access to these particular files. It took fucking months to arrange this fact-finding search and the verdict is in.

Steve Rogers is dead.

Here are records, here are signed statements, here are people who saw him take off, heard him crash land. Phillips, Carter. Names that sound true, names that mean trustworthy. These are the files they protect kids from, and they date his pal’s death a full month and change before the papers even reported him missing.

Fucking hell. Fucking _fuck!_ In what world is that fair? To survive all of this, to scour the life you were forced to forget, to learn that your enemies now are the same ones you fought against with your best friend in all the world all those years ago… 

To survive only to find out your friend didn’t.

He shakes his head and closes the current file, puts the others on top of it, crushing it down like it’s fucking crushed him with its incontrovertible evidence. 

No. He hadn’t believed it when some twerp’s schoolbook said so, and he doesn’t believe it now. He can’t. He won’t. His pal just cannot be dead. 

Steve Rogers can’t be dead.

There’s another file somewhere. There’s a file that says they found him alive and the serum kept him alive, and he didn’t age and is still— Is maybe alive in a cryochamber somewhere, maybe in a position like his own, maybe— 

The lights dim and then brighten again, the five-minute warning before the doors close and librarians come along to shoo people out. And fine. So what. Five minutes? He’s already done here. 

He doesn’t need five more minutes to desperately hunt down a file proclaiming his friend alive and just in need of finding, of search and rescue, of some turned tables and returned favors from the past. Kreischberg but the other way around. -What happened to you? -I got an alien goo buddy. -Did it hurt? -Surprisingly little.

But.

There is no such file. Steve Rogers is not waiting somewhere for him. Steve Rogers is dead.

“Ready to head back to the motel, V?” he murmurs.

The little black and white keychain fob at his belt crawls upward and seeps into his side, and then he gets to feel just how upset he is based on Venom’s reaction to it.

**What has _happened?_ Why did you not say something?**

_It’s nothing,_ he thinks as he makes his way through the stacks toward the exit. _I just…_

He packs it back away with effort and manages a smile and a polite word of thanks for the library security staff who see him out.

“When we’re home, sweetie. I— I can’t here.”

######  **VENOM:**

**— Washington D.C.: Just past sunset, 02 November 1969 —**

He can’t there, and apparently, he also can’t on the way home. Whatever it is he’s found is terrible.

Is the pal… No. 

They make a very pointed effort and take far more cautions than usual to avoid having their thoughts transmitted to their host. The only more foolproof way to navigate would be to return to the keychain, and that is unacceptable. 

They will not abandon their host in this time of need, even if to remain fully seated inside their collective self will risk exposure of a thought that is terrible. Bucky is doing his part by withdrawing and becoming small inside their shared consciousness, so it is safe enough to offer the comfort of their presence, even if not their thoughts.

Because their thinking is that there are only so many types of bad news their host can have received at this collection of historical manuscripts. 

The pal might be someone else entirely, not this Steve Rogers they are here to look up the truth about. They have both grown very fond of the idea of Steve Rogers, the pal. What if Steve Rogers is not the pal after all and they need to start over once more?

That would be terrible. But not the worst. 

What if the pal is Steve Rogers, but he is not who they thought he was? Not actually a pal, or someone they were as close to as to anyone else, but no closer? What if Bucky misremembered and gave more importance to Steve Rogers than was due, and Steve Rogers himself was just… a person in the army?

That would be terrible, also. 

But worst would be if Steve Rogers, the pal, was dead.

That is— That would be the very worst. To find the pal only to lose the pal again, before even connecting.

It is what the book said, back in the fall. It said that Steve Rogers was small, and then he was poisoned by science and became large. Enhanced, the book called it. But unnaturally so. Like Bucky, poisoned by Zola’s science and made better than ordinary human beings.

And Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes were great pals, even when Steve Rogers was small. They were in a war together. And Steve Rogers saved the country by dying in a plane crash. 

But Bucky had not believed. No. Their host had been adamant. History books lie, he had insisted. And the books also said that their host was dead, so yes, they did lie.

But apparently not about everything. Apparently… not about the pal. 

There is a crack in the silence once their host slips into the motel room and closes the door behind them. It is like a hole in the bottom of a bucket of sadness, and all the sadness springs out from it. 

“He’s gone,” Bucky whispers at the closed door, dropping his own carefully held partition fully and flooding their collective consciousness and his own face with tears. “He’s fucking _dead_ , V.”

Venom puddles out from his side and twines a few thicker tendrils around his middle. Pulls them tight. Strokes his cheek.

There is nothing to say except that they are sorry—sorry that the pal is dead, sorry that their host is so sad, sorry that they don’t have any way to fix things. And saying sorry has no meaning at all compared to showing it.

“All the way back in 19—” Their host shakes his head. “Fuck.”

**Go to the sofa and sit down.**

“Why bother? We should just grab our shit and leave. I found what I found.”

 **Go to the sofa,** they repeat. **Sit. Down.**

They would far rather not have to “pull the Pinocchio” and _put_ their host on the sofa, but if it has to be done… 

Bucky goes to the sofa and flops bonelessly down on it to stare at the floor. “I don’t know what we’re doing after this, sweetheart.” 

**We will resume our previous mission and destroy HYDRA. And eat all the rabbits.**

“You don’t even like rabbits.” 

It is the answer to the joke, but there is no smile—not external and not internal. Fuckity-fuck.

They add another pair of thin, inky tendrils and begin stroking their host’s hair, massaging his scalp. **You have so many thoughts now. So many memories. You are even more Bucky now than before.**

“What’s it matter, though? I—” He sighs irritably and shakes his head, abandoning speech for thought when his voice breaks again. 

_I’m Bucky, but do I have a right to be Bucky?_

**Yes.**

_Bucky would never have let his pal pilot a plane into the ocean piled high with bombs._

**Yes you would. You love bombs.**

_Not_ alone _. Not on a death flight._ He shifts on the sofa and pulls their hands down from his scalp to hold them in his own, tightly enough that they can see the knuckles of his right hand pale.

_Where the hell was I when he pulled this stunt? Why wasn’t I there to save his stubborn reckless ass or go down with him?_

Well the book they read before answered that question. Why is their host even asking it? Is this denial? They thought Bucky had already done denial. Back in the fall. With the first book. 

**You were already dead. On the top secret mission.**

_Then where were the others? Where was the woman, Carter? She could have talked some sense into him. She could talk sense into anything._

**And then there would be no Washington D.C. and no Smithsonian and no big museum of old things to look at.**

They pause to generate a face from Bucky’s shoulder, the better to nuzzle into his cheek and drool on his neck. 

**“Because the bombs would have destroyed it all.”**

Bucky turns toward them, leaning into the arms enough that Venom expands them to include an experimental torso. Just how much of a separate body can be generated before they are too external to their host for comfort and safety?

Apparently, a torso, arms, neck and head are not too much, because when they complete forming these features, their host tries to crush them in a hug and nothing budges or collapses in on itself. 

“I know,” he mutters miserably into their shoulder. “I fucking _know_ , and that’s what makes it all worse.” 

They thread their fingers up through his hair at the back of his neck and hold his head close to their chest. **“Do you regret finding out?”**

They can feel their host shaking his head against them. “Just wish I’d found an address that wasn’t an empty grave in Arlington.”

Venom tucks their host as close as possible without seeping back inside of him. **“I am glad that you were not on a plane with bombs,”** they say. **“I am glad you did not blow up in the ocean. I was in an iceberg and would not have been able to help.”**

“You wouldn’t even have known us.”

**“I know you now. And I would be very unhappy if I did not have you for a host.”**

There’s an impression of agreement and chagrin that does not make full sense. But when they are somewhat external to their host, he does not always make full sense to them.

“I’d be miserable without you, too. Not just because I’d be empty upstairs, but because I’d be lonely as fucking hell and not knowing what I was missing, only that I was missing it. Missing you.”

 **“Is…”** This seems like one of the times for spacing out the words. **“Is it enough that you have me and that we have each other? Even if the pal is lost to us?”**

“Lost to us? You didn’t even—”

**“Your pal is my pal. We are bonded too tightly for anything less.”**

Understanding washes over them.

“Yeah, sweetheart. You’re enough. _We’re_ enough.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content Warnings: No one actually dies, but they discover that Steve Rogers really did crash the Valkyrie and disappear into the Arctic Ocean with a planeload of bombs. It wasn’t just a history book telling lies.


	10. Five Times They Were Bonded… | Domestic

######  **BUCKY:**

**— Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: A little after noon, 21 December 1975 —**

“What? What the hell does that even _mean?_ ” He shakes the instruction page with a low growl. “I only have sixteen of those and I already used twelve of them over _there_ , so how the fuck do I use six _here?_ ”

**Are you sure it is the A screw and not the B screw that you need?**

“No,” Bucky snaps. “No, I’m not at _all_ sure, because neither of the screw packages were labeled A _or_ B! These people can’t label things _or_ do math. Let’s hear it for the Swedes.”

**Do you have a defective package?**

“My package works just fine, sweetheart.” 

He glowers at the first page of the instructions while Venom’s laughter rolls over him in delighted waves. It helps that at least one of them isn’t fed up with this pile of boards and bolts. If they were rich, he’d have hired a guy to put this shit together instead of just a truck to deliver it from Canada. 

Then they could be out getting pancakes and coffee, or maybe just flitting from diner to diner like an alien-possessed hummingbird in search of chocolates and various other tasty treats.

But they’re not rich, or even marginally well off now that they’ve got this apartment to pay for instead of camping out in various hostels and raided bases when they aren’t lingering in a target’s home. 

And they do need a permanent address if they’re going into business to get the money that would let them hire people to wrangle furniture assembly. The money they need to live at least a somewhat normal life, with steady groceries and temperature-controlled living quarters.

**It is a good move.**

“Yep. It was time.” 

Time to settle down a bit, put a roof over their heads that they could call mostly their own. Pay some taxes, even, support the school districts, the arts, whatever.

Not time to slow down the hunt for HYDRA, but time to rest, gather resources, figure out a strategy for that hunt that will work in the long term. Probably the very, very long term. Because he’s not getting any younger… but he’s clearly not getting any older, either.

Whether that’s Venom’s doing or a result of his hanging out in a cryochamber for however long or even Zola and his mystery injections from the bad old days, the fact remains that he doesn’t look a day over— 

Well, he looks sort of ageless. But in a young way.

**You look good. Healthy. All of your organs are in pristine condition. Perfectly plump without being flabby. I keep track.**

He laughs and sends over a mental image of a goo blob polishing off a liver until it shines.

**Yes, exactly. I even spit on them, first.**

“Fuckin’ weirdo.”

Maybe that’s what’s kept them going for this long scrounging off the bottom dregs of society and slinking in the shadows to hunt their prey, even after the blow that was learning the cold hard truth about Steve 6-feet-under Rogers. 

Venom is a fucking weirdo. He is a fucking weirdo. Losers in love, the two of them.

Momentarily broke losers in love, to be more specific. 

Which is why it’s up to him to put together every fucking piece of furniture they bought, or else get used to sitting on the floor again until they can get their company officially set up or hunt down a target to eat and then rob for food and funds. 

And his ass doesn’t want to go back to sitting on the ground, thanks.

**My ass does not, either. Our ass wants a comfy chair. And a sofa. With cushions. And a bed for you to sleep in.**

“I know, love, I know.” Bucky pinches the bridge of his nose and breathes out long and slow. There’s really nothing for it. The cabinet must be built, and he must build it. Time to be very, very patient. “I’m going to fucking start over,” he mutters.

He’s going have to undo the earlier stuff and redo it with the other screws. That’s all. Then he’ll have six of these short ones available for this part and ten more left over for whatever the hell is happening on page seven.

**You want help?**

“Already got your help on that one dining chair that is irreparably fucked up. I’d like to keep it to just the one ruined piece. This shit was expensive. We picked out good stuff.”

**Just “bullshit hard” stuff to assemble.**

“Hard like a five million year old dino turd, yes. Exactly.” He sets about to unscrewing everything and laying all the parts out once more. “But it’s not like we knew what fresh hell we were in for when we read ‘assembly required,’ did we?”

**It is not too late to hire a man who is handy. Or a woman. They can be handy, too. They all have two of them.**

“I’m a handyman myself, doll. I just don’t assemble Swedish furniture on the regular, is all.” Looked good in the magazine, fun names, too. And it works for Sweden, so why not them? Might not last forever, but it’ll get them started and it’ll be fairly portable, they’d thought. 

Now that he’s had some fun assembling things—he’s got a coffee table, one fucked up dining chair, and a set of modular bookcases that can expand from two to three if he puts them together and slaps some more shelves in between—he knows that they are emphatically _not_ disassembling these things to move later. 

So portability is no longer a check in the plus column. But it’s not a check in the minus column, either. A solid piece is going to be just as much of a pain in the ass later on as disassembling a less solid piece. 

**Are you going to do the thing? Assemble the cabinet? Or are you going to think about moving out of the apartment we are not yet finished moving into?**

“Right, right.”

 _Okay._ Bucky sits back on his heels. 

So this board here goes up against that board there, and he’ll use the longer screws this time. No problem. He’s got two dozen of those. If he can work on his arm using the red book and some specialty tools, then he can put together a cabinet using the tools specially supplied for that specific cabinet.

Who’d have thought furniture was harder to assemble than motorcycle innards or one of a kind cybernetic arms? Hell, harder to assemble than a team of lawyers specializing the in the legal dark arts and laundering shenanigans. And that’s saying something, given how hush-hush all that dark side of the law business tends to be.

**If you don’t want to assemble it, we can take a break. We could go eat. You were thinking very good thoughts about eating earlier. Pancakes.**

“In a bit. I want to finish this thing. I know where I went wrong, so I can do it right this time.”

**You can do it right after we eat.**

“Or I can forget all these insights about the screws and do it wrong a second time.”

**And then throw a handful of parts out the window.**

They sound almost chagrined about having done that earlier, which is a combination of adorable and upsetting. It wasn’t Venom’s fault the instructions were a pain in the ass. And his own temper was most likely egging Venom on, anyway, and— 

“And then throw a handful of parts out the window,” he agrees. “But we went down and grabbed them all right after, so it’s fine. Really. No harm done.” 

It was a near thing about getting all the littler bits, since they punched through the crust of snow to the side of the sidewalk, but they did get it all. And hell, the sidewalk area is clearer now, anyway, from them digging through the snow bank. Win-win.

**Except for the paint job.**

“That guy’s car was already ugly, and he was parked in our space, so it serves him right. He got what he got.” And didn’t put up a fight about it when he saw how big his new neighbor was. Ha. 

Bucky grabs for a new pair of boards and a handful of wooden pegs. “Hammering,” he announces before proceeding to hammer the wooden pegs into the wooden slots and then the second board into place as well. It’s not too loud, but Venom appreciates a courtesy warning all the same.

“Anyway, now he knows to think before he parks. New tenants move in all the time. Can’t just assume an empty spot goes with a vacant apartment because it was vacant before.”

**It does not look different from any other spot. It is two lines on the asphalt. Like all the other lines on the asphalt. It does not have our names on it.**

“The spot itself doesn’t have to be marked Jimmy Varnes for it to be our spot. It’s numbered on the sidewalk curb.” He turns a page in the instructions and opts to read the whole damn page before doing a single thing. 

“521,” he adds. “That’s us, says so in the lease.”

######  **VENOM:**

**— Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: A early evening, 21 December 1975 —**

When they finally get outside the apartment on their way to a local diner, it is almost cold enough to turn around and go directly back inside.

 **“People can bring our food to us,”** they murmur as softly as they can. Being partly external has its advantages in that they can experience more of the world outside their host, but it does also mean others can hear their part of the conversation if they aren’t careful about their volume. **“We can be warm and cozy on the floor, admiring our cabinet.**

Their host pulls his collar up higher and adjusts the way they drape over his neck and shoulders to better cover his neck and lower face. At least he is taking good care of himself. 

And even suggested they become an apparently fuzzy black scarf to protect against the wind blowing icy water into their face. They enjoy posing as scarves, all black with white veining and fringe, looking all fuzzy when they are anything but. Nuzzling Bucky’s cheeks and neck and burrowing snugly against his skin.

Life as a scarf would not be so bad if scarves could eat and they were sure that they would always be Bucky’s scarf.

“Well, you wanted a stroll, and I _needed_ one, sweetheart. Can’t sit there having all those bits of things looking at me.”

Bucky turns a corner and starts down a less windy street. There is a small forest further ahead that doesn’t seem to belong in the city.

“‘Sides,” he says, “if we get delivery, it costs more. We just paid for a load of furniture and put down most of what else we’ve managed to save on a deposit and first month’s rent, plus all those legal fees. We can get our own food on our own two feet.”

They grumble wordlessly into their shared headspace and settle in to watch the world as it passes by. Building, boring. Another building, still boring. Banks of dingy gray-black slush, boring. Car, bor—!

“Aw, fuck you, too, pal!” their host yells after the car.

**“That car splashed us with slush and street mud!”**

“Yep. Merry Christmas.” Their Bucky shakes off the bottom of his coat and brushes a chunk of congealed street gunk off the side of it. “City of brotherly love, my ass.”

Another minute of walking brings them to the forest itself. 

**“What is that?”**

“What is wha— Oh, the trees?” 

Their host slows down and turns off the sidewalk into the small forest of recently deceased evergreen trees.

“Tree farm, kinda.” 

There’s an image of a much taller tree farm, similarly on a street corner like this one, and of the pal when he was little, and much assessment of the trees. Bickering. Squabbling over which was best of the affordable options.

“We picked out a tree every year and set it up in the apartment. For Christmas.” Bucky shrugs. “It was a Rogers family tradition, and we just sort of kept it going when his ma died.”

 **“You selected a conifer corpse and established it in your home?”** they whisper. **“As a display of mastery over the elements?”**

“Uh, _no._ It was just, I don’t know. Bright and shiny and cheerful. Smelled good, too.” 

Their host feels so warm and nostalgic. Maybe he will continue to feel warm and nostalgic if they select a tree corpse and establish it in their home.

**“I want one.”**

“You want a Christmas tree?”

**“I want one, yes. One of these sapling corpses.”**

Hesitation, temptation to say “no” and keep walking. So much hesitation, and only partly about money. What does their host object to, exactly, about warmth and nostalgia? It feels delicious from where they sit.

“Hey, uh,” their host is saying to the man sitting in the forest. “How much are the trees this year?”

They are getting a corpse for Christmas! 

They surreptitiously sneak a few tendrils out along the keychain and down under the hem of the coat, letting eyes form on the ends to better inspect the forest of dead trees. Some of them are short and stumpy, others tall and gangly, some so fat they are almost round. So much variety in the conifer graveyard.

And now they move along from tree to tree, under the watchful eye of the graveyard’s guardian. 

“Well?” their host murmurs. “Let me know which one you like. We can come back and grab it on our way back, after we eat.”

**“What is Christmas? We ignored it last year. And the years before.”**

“Fancy holiday where people buy pointless shit to give each other and show off. Sometimes it’s special, though, if you’ve got the right people around.”

**“But our person is dead, so it’s just us.”**

“…Yeah. Stevie’s gone. So it’s just us.”

**“I still want one. We are enough, remember?”**

“Sure do, doll. We’re enough. So which one’s striking your fancy? And then we’ll get some dim sum.”

 **“Mmm.”** Dim sum and also a corpse. What a nice treat. **“I want this little fat one.”**

“One fat little Christmas tree, coming right up.” 

* * *

As it happens, a corpse must be properly decked out in finery and glitter to be welcome inside the home. There is even a funereal garment called a tree skirt that the corpse must wear to protect the floor from the corpse’s decomposition. 

Such a fascinating ritual. 

It includes swearing while putting up a tree stand, and filling a little basin with water, and then lying in a panting, exhausted heap under the newly installed corpse and basking in the glory of a job well done. 

There are lights, as well, a string of them, and then glittering ornamental bulbs and figurines to hang on the dead branches.

But before that— A phone call to take.

“Yeah, hi, Larry. So— Uh huh? Uh-huh. That’s great! When can we— Now?! Already? Damn, you move fast.”

From their vantage point in one of the empty ornaments, a dainty little glass home that will only be comfortable for a short while, it’s interesting to listen to the phone call and watch their Bucky wander around the kitchen tethered to the wall with a spiral cord just as they are tethered to Bucky with a tendril of their mass.

“So we’re all set up, then. Everything’s above board. And we’re paying all the right taxes, right? I don’t want stupid kids in my school district. We’re gonna do our part.”

This must be what it’s like for others listening to them conversing when they are fully integrated and only Bucky’s voice can be heard. Only the one side of the conversation. Having to fill in the gaps. Guess at what is being reacted to. No wonder they get so many odd looks in the street.

“Yeah, I know our business model is— Well, we can still kill people for cash and want to support the school district. Hey, I’m an assassin, not a politician. I have morals. Put aside whatever we actually owe. The rest can go to the offshore accounts.”

It sounds like they will be able to legally get paid for disappearing people soon. If not already. Larry moves so fast, after all. It’s almost a shame they never bothered to pay attention to the stuff with the lawyers and accountant. Paperwork, though. So boring. 

Not at all like this sparkly glass slipper they fit into perfectly, or that tiny trio of spheres called a snowman that shivers when they expand to fill out the inner ridges. And not like the lights that flicker and dance, and that chase themselves along the strings when they get plugged into the wall.

“Okay, then. That sounds good. We’ll get on that. Yeah. Yep. ‘Kay, thanks. Yeah, Merry Christmas to you, too. Say hi to the kids. Bye.”

Click goes the phone onto the hook, and then— 

“V? Where the hell— Oh, fucking—” he laughs. “Come on. Get outta there. You’re gonna break it and we’ll have glass all up in the tree skirt.”

**“I would not break it.”**

Venom slithers out of their current ornament and nuzzles up against his cheek.

**“But if I did, we will soon be able to buy many more, because we can go to work now.”**

“That’s partly right. We can go to work, we just have to find a client to go to work _for_.”

**“And then we get paid to eat!”**

“And then we get paid to eat.” Bucky kisses the top of their head and accepts a lick in return. “Wanna string some more lights, sweetheart?”

 **“And then flop again to admire it,”** they agree, before sinking into their Bucky fully and strengthening their bond. The flood of stereo thoughts—his and theirs, twined—blankets them in comforting reverberations.

 **The furniture can wait,** they pour into their mutual thoughts.

“You got it, love.” Bucky flexes his fingers and plucks the next box of twinkle lights from their bag.

 **Yes. It can wait. Now is the time for celebration and nostalgia.** The pal can be with them in his own way, and they can do the tradition for him, even though he is as dead as this tree.

It is nice to honor the pal like this.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, folks, there's the fifth of the "times they were bonded," so heads up for next time~
> 
> Content Warnings: None needed this chapter (that I know of— let me know if I’m wrong and I’ll add one).


	11. …And The One Time They Were Split Apart | It’s a Trap!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The days this week got away from me! Pretend it's Wednesday...?

######  **BUCKY:**

**— Des Moines, Iowa: Well before dawn, 19 April 1982 —**

**Why are we wasting so much time here? The view is not that good.**

Bucky jumps down to the next level of bells and inspects the wiring there, too. So far everything in this bell tower looks ancient and manual, just like the client had assured him.

“Hey, I’m just making sure none of this shit goes off while we’re up here, that’s all.” 

**She said that the bell tower was defunct. You said that defunct meant nothing will ring.**

“You remember St. Louis? You want another St. Louis while we’re _in_ the bell tower and not just across the street from it? Hmm?”

 **We are in the bell tower now,** Venom grumbles.

 _So pissy this morning._ Bucky flicks one of the many spiders off his arm. Hard to imagine anyone else getting all the way up here without getting creeped out before they reached the top.

**I am not pissy! I am wanting our morning chocolate. You are not energized enough without it.**

“Hey, I’m plenty energetic, even after climbing all seven hundred and fifty-eight fucking spider-infested steps to get up here.”

Energy out the ass is what he’s got, all wired about this op. Last thing he needs is a big old cup of chocolate espresso. Fucking jittery fingers for a long-range assassination is stupid, and he is not stupid.

Venom wouldn’t be stupid, either, except they are in a dreaded bell tower and he knows full well they _do_ still remember St. Louis.

**Fine. Yes. I remember St. Louis.**

“I know you do, love. I do, too. We’re not doing St. Louis again. We know better.”

St. Louis, the op where they utterly blew their cover because they hadn’t realized the tower across the street would suddenly blare out a recording of some ghastly bell routine that signaled noon in those parts.

Venom had literally spooked right out of Bucky’s skin and had to be coaxed out of their hiding place in a remarkably compatible pigeon that had likewise spooked and taken flight at the same time.

But these bells are all manual. Actual bells, with actual mechanized pulleys and gears and ropes. Someone would have to come in after them to set these off, would have to sit at this ridiculous bell-ringing piano with the wooden pegs everywhere. No one’s going to do that, and they’d hear anyone who did.

And he’s not seeing anything at all like a loudspeaker that might play a recorded masochistic medley of metal.

What he’s seeing are dust and cobwebs and a metric fuck-ton of spiders that indicate the only person up here for at least a year is him. Probably for longer. Probably five years. Maybe even ten.

The chances of someone deciding there’s gotta be a bunch of bells tolling the hour after years of nada are pretty slim.

**So it is a good roost and we can leave it now to get our morning chocolate.**

“So it’s a good roost and we can continue to inspect the hell out of it—sorry building, the heaven out of you—and make absolutely sure, because I don’t want another St. Louis.” He shakes a spider out of his hair. “Chasing pigeons sucked enough. I’m not chasing bats or whatever else in here you can hitch a ride with.”

**There is no one here to ring the bells. The building is locked up so tight the door to this tower was oxidized shut before you kicked it in.**

_Nice dodge on the trigger word, V._

**Thank you. There are cobwebs everywhere. Spiders. No one has rung the bells, no one has entered the building, no one has set up an alarm. We are the only disturbance here. Eat some chocolate.**

Bucky sighs and taps one of the bells lightly with a metal finger. There’s a faint peal of some note or other, but nothing all that loud. Of course, one little metal finger lightly tapping the outside is different from a fucking clapper of solid bronze the size of a soccer ball whacking the inside hard.

“Alright.” He starts back down the godawful—sorry building—number of stairs. “We’ll have a chocolate bar because you’re cranky, and then get on with looking through the church itself again. I just want to be sure, is all.”

**I have not sensed any danger this whole time, not even when meeting with the client. I always sense a dangerous client. Secondary motives.**

“I know, I know. I just—”

**I am good at it. Perfectly paranoid. Just like you.**

“Let me be sure, okay?” He eases the door open again on its now-loose hinges, and gives the doorframe an apologetic pat as he slips back into the narthex. “It’s not every hit the client stipulates time and place. And it’s definitely not every hit they want a specific method.”

Venom grumbles again, low and reverberating through his skull, but quiets down the moment the chocolate bar comes out to play.

By the time dawn spills over and between the buildings to the east, he’s eaten seven of their breakfast chocolate bars, and they’ve secured the premises thoroughly enough to satisfy even his prickling paranoia, which is even more perfectly paranoid than Venom’s.

 **Let me guess,** Venom says as he starts back up the fucking stairs. **It is now time for one last check?**

“Har har.” Bucky shoulders his rifle case. “Time for checking is over. Time for waiting is up next, then time for killing.”

**Then we get paid and eat a big lunch to make up for not getting to eat this target.**

“Sure. You pick. We got a pancake place down the street. That’s always good. Or we can try something new. Haven’t had—”

**Pancakes.**

“Space bug after my own heart.” He grins into the silence. “Sorry, love.”

 **You will actually** **_be_ ** **sorry one of these days, Bucky. Full of regret for the years of insults.**

“Aw, you love it,” he says with a laugh. 

######  **VENOM:**

**— Des Moines, Iowa: Around dawn, 19 April 1982 —**

And so what if they _do_ love it? Loving it is not a reason to cast insult upon insult and to claim that they are a bug of some kind. Like these spiders everywhere, too small and insignificant to even be compared to them.

They would grumble again, but their Bucky is now eating another chocolate bar and stocking up on all the chemicals that will combine to sustain them during their long wait through the morning. 

They do not see why chocolate espresso would not sustain them just as well, but sometimes a host does know best. This will still do fine for raw materials, even if the hot beverage version would be even more pleasant to consume.

Ah, a host who is perfect and also loves to eat what he needs to sustain them both.

And who takes such care when setting things up for killing. It is not the first time they have watched the ease of assembly when one of their host’s louder killing tools goes from so many parts to one cohesive death bringer.

But it never gets old.

From someone who cannot smoothly assemble a bookshelf, the seamless movements of putting a rifle together from parts in a case is a glorious contrast full of delicious competence. 

Bucky checks things over, sights and adjusts as needed, makes whatever mental calculations are necessary to ensure a good result. The sensation is one of smoothness, of rightness, of things slotting together into the perfect position and working just right.

Everything in the world lines up when he does this.

Even if they have never bothered to understand the mental calculations—and why would they, when their Bucky would be using the results instead of themself?—they still shift happily and bask in the setup, slithering around his pancreas in glee. 

_You done praising me for being able to put a weapon together?_ comes their host’s amused thought.

**No. But I will stop now. Your head is already big enough for the both of us.**

Bucky smirks, the pull of his lips to the side revealing the expression as clearly as the amusement flooding their mind.

_Love you, too, sweetheart._

It is tempting to bask in that, also, but there _is_ a job to do, and too much basking tends to be distracting. They can bask after the target is dead.

 **Is there more chocolate?** they ask after their host is set up in position with the rifle braced on his metal arm and his knee stabilizing the lot of it. 

_Yeah, but I figured we’d be better saving that for later, in case this takes a lot longer than planned._

**How long could it take? Bullets are very fast. It is their saving grace. The way they make up for being very loud.**

_Bullets are fast, but targets are unpredictable. Should be swinging by around 8 AM but who knows?_ Bucky remains stock still, almost still enough to make them want to move around inside just to counter it, if that wouldn’t be distracting.

 _Alarm didn’t go off,_ Bucky continues, _or they hit snooze a few too many times. Cat knocked over a cup of milk and they had to clean it up before leaving the house. Traffic was worse than expected, maybe a collision or a street light is busted._

**Maybe all of the above.**

_Exactly. So 8 AM could turn into 9 AM could turn into noon, could turn into a no-show._ Bucky scans the streets with their sparse and sluggish population, an image of the target and his movements in mind from when they staked him out earlier. 

_Figured if it turned into a lunchtime assassination, we might want a few bites of chocolate to keep you happy._

**I would not get cranky before you did.**

_You got cranky just a couple hours ago, doll._

**It is impolite to point that out.**

Internal laughter, lips curling in a smile, eyes still sharp and focused on the streets. _Whatever you say, love._

* * *

As the sun inches closer and closer to being directly overhead, and the target continues to not show up, they start thinking more and more fondly of the chocolate bars in Bucky’s pack. 

Perhaps they could extend a small tendril and collect one of them, maybe feed it to Bucky in little pieces. They could work the zipper and wrapper, and their host could stay exactly as still and focused as needed to make their kill.

That should be fine. They could be very quiet and avoid crinkling the wrappers. That wouldn’t be too distracting, would it? 

_Yes. It would be. And chewing would fuck up my aim even if you were doing all the rest._

**That thought was not meant for you.**

_So get better at hiding your thoughts._

**Now who is cranky?**

_I’d say neither of us, but talking would—_

**Fuck up your aim.**

_Exactly._

**What if the target does not appear at all today? A “no-show.” The window is nearly closed now.**

_Then we say “fuck it,” pack up our roost, hunt the bastard down, and do things our way. We only agreed to this exact scenario because it’s a classic and we’re—I’m, anyway—really good at it._

**You** **_are_ ** **really good at it. The best.**

_Maybe not the best. There’s bound to be someone out there who can outshoot me. But I’m still damn good._

**Mmm. The self-confidence is a good feeling in you.**

_That’s possibly the creepiest way to adapt the “it’s a good look” saying, you know. Congrats._

**Thank you. I tried.**

_Tried to be creepy or— Hang on, here we go._

######  **BUCKY:**

**— Des Moines, Iowa: Just before noon, 19 April 1982 —**

There are many things to expect when a target enters the field hours later than anticipated. Target looking harried, check. Target is running late, nervous, trying to rush to make up the lost time. Check.

Field itself not as planned, check. More bystanders, fewer bystanders, different bystanders… whichever, it will throw things off. This time, different bystanders is the order of the day. Check. 

Not the breakfasting crowd or the work crowd groggy and anxious to arrive, no. But the eager lunchers and brunchers, looking forward to the fresh air, admiring the skyline, not in the least bit of hurry and therefore meandering all around in his fucking way.

Delightful. But nothing he can’t work with. There’s a reason long distance killers take to high places.

They’ll just have to get the fuck out of dodge way, way faster now than they would have had to before, when everyone was still half-asleep and apathetic.

He waits for the woman with the stroller to get clear of any splash zone—because assassins can still be nice people, that’s why—and fixes their target in the sights. One less whatever and whoever in the world.

**But we know who he is.**

_Shhhh. I’m distancing myself for the kill, love._

**Shh-shing.**

Target acquired, target clear, target locked in sights, and— 

—And all hell breaks loose.

Screaming is to be expected when a guy’s head explodes in the street. That’s not what the screaming is about, though, because before he got around to pulling the fucking trigger, every single noise-maker in this god-forsaken—fuck you, building, it’s true—tower went off.

That’s him screaming, them, him and Venom both, and some tiny part of him thinks it’s time to be grateful the bells are drowning them out because anyone investigating is going to have some serious questions about the rifle, the dude with the metal arm, and the liquid splatters of space goo rocketing out in a blind-and-deaf panic.

His knees hit the ground as the rifle does, and it’s only luck the damn thing doesn’t go off and shoot him or someone else, and it’s all he can do to try to reach for and pull at Venom while every instinctive fiber of his being tries to clap his hands over his ears.

Fucking being enhanced.

He goddamn checked this place! He checked it so fucking thoroughly, and— 

“Venom!” he bellows, hardly daring to hope they can hear him over the bells. Hell, he can’t hear himself over the fucking brass monstrosities, and at this point isn’t sure he can even hear the bells themselves.

There’s still internal shrieking though, and the same sensation of an internal skin peeling away like in St. Louis, and a sphere of black splatter like so much ink dribbled in water extending out from him as Venom tries and fails to find a safe harbor from the sonic storm.

 _“This way! Venom, I’m right here!”_ Is he even yelling at all? Is he making any kind of noise whatsoever? Fucking these fucking bells!

The piano thing. Get to the piano thing. Fucking _kill_ whoever’s playing it, and then collect his partner and burn down this tower, this church, this whole fucking city street. 

Then hunt down their client and show her why no one pulls shit like this.

Piano first, though, can’t help Venom if these wretched bells are—

He reaches up to slap at a spider—fucking things are— haven’t bitten him this whole time and now— 

The next step vanishes from under his feet, or he misses it, or something is— 

It’s so fucking empty inside, and dark outside, and cold, and falling— Yeah, falling, and hitting what feels like every single one of these steps on the way down.

The floor stops shoving him over and down just long enough to spit him out sprawling on the dusty, cobwebbed tower entrance, but the world itself doesn’t stop spinning just yet, and even the star pricks behind his eyes are steadily growing dimmer and dimmer.

Not a spider, then. Dart or… something. Not good.

 _Venom?_ He tries to reach out for them, mentally even if his body won’t obey, but there’s nothing but emptiness and bells. _Ven— Venom…_

“Good afternoon, Soldier.”

Ffuckity-fuhhh… 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We all knew what a 5 + 1 chapter title trope was going to lead up to, right? Right?
> 
> Content Warning: Spiders. _So_ many spiders.


	12. Wump

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The not-so-eagerly anticipated chapter called Wump! Yay! ^_^ (content warnings at the end notes)

######  **VENOM:**

**— Bell tower, Des Moines, Iowa: Evening, 19 April 1982 —**

The only vibrations left when the temperature drops are the tiny ripples of spiders restringing their webs, flies getting caught up in them, and dust slowly drifting to the floor like motes of snow on a still winter night.

There is still the pain and damage of the earlier vibrations—the loudness, the frequency—doing its level best to shake them apart… and somewhat succeeding. 

And there is still the stretched feeling, being in too many places at once, too many pieces, too spread apart. It is a weak feeling, an empty feeling, a lonely feeling. Cold.

They haven’t felt lonely in over a dozen years. Haven’t _been_ lonely in that long. 

They haven’t been lonely because their host… their Bucky… Where is their Bucky? Where has he gone? Even after an ambush like this one, _especially_ after an ambush like this one, he would never leave without— 

They slowly seep from the brickwork, each fragment of rock slowly giving up a fragment of _them_ to dribble down into a puddle and congeal once more into a mass great enough to— Ack!

To choke on the atmosphere if without a host for too long, even after so many years of adapting with their host, but— 

Spider. Big fat spider with a nice round belly. She will do.

The temptation to devour this host is a strong one, but they resist. They are weakened by the vibrations, but not yet so weak that they must kill a host to survive. Especially not a piece of them this small. 

And this host is mobile. Vaguely suggestible. Easily controllable, though with far too many legs and eyes after all these years in a host with just two of each. 

Yes, this host will do, but she will not do all on her own. She is too small and there are too many pieces. They will need to make use of her sisters in this death trap of a building. They have never entered more than one host at a time. Have only split off a piece of themself here or there while the majority resides in a host.

But… If it is possible, they will do it. And if it is _not_ possible, they will _still_ do it.

They need to find Bucky. They _will_ find Bucky. Their Bucky.

Bucky would never abandon them, willingly or unwillingly. Bucky is theirs and they are Bucky’s. If Bucky is not here, that means he was taken. 

And no one takes their host away.

######  **JANICE:**

**— General Hospital, Des Moines, Iowa: Early morning, 23 April 1982 —**

The subject’s temperature remains the same, steadily but just slightly feverish. The subject’s breathing remains the same, steadily but shallowly in and out according to the regimen set by the respirator. The subject’s blood pressure remains the same, steadily just on the healthy side of remarkably low.

The subject’s pulse and brainwaves do not remain the same, but jump and drop in ways that make the subject look suspiciously awake, despite Jake’s reassurances that he is well and truly under.

And he must be under, not merely in a twilight sleep, just like the anesthesiologist says, and certainly _not_ aware of what is happening to him. This might be morally challenging research of alien lifeforms, but it is still ethical to the greatest extent possible where human lifeforms are concerned.

They say that the subject’s been enhanced, that he’s been the subject of countless prior tests, the result of scientific miracles. That he’s used to this, signed up for it before, is still under contract. That he doesn’t feel pain the way others do.

Also, that he’s dangerously deranged from the last clinical trial, and liable to rip them all to shreds if he were to be awake or aware of his surroundings. That it’s this or a padded cell in a psych ward, if not the electric chair.

They say that this is why he has been kept so heavily drugged, and kept on the respirator, and kept shackled to the operating table in seven places and tied down in two more by leather straps when they aren’t working on him. 

Keeping the subject from attacking is why Kendra’s mechanical team has taken his arm apart and neglected to put it back together, unlike Brad’s biological team, which has taken his torso apart repeatedly and carefully put it back together every time.

They say a lot of things, but she’s starting to wonder how much of it is believable. Because people who are kept fully under anesthesia between operations don’t flinch when the door opens to the operating room they’re being kept in.

“Something the matter, Jan?”

Seems Brad beat her in this morning.

She takes a few steps into the room and tries to brush off her hesitation. “Just had a thought about what to get my brother for his birthday,” she lies. 

It’s doubtful Brad cares in the slightest, but something’s always seemed off about him, and she’d rather not be vivisecting a test subject across the table from him with him thinking suspicious thoughts about her. Who knows where she’d end up if something really _is_ off about him, given he’s the team lead for this project.

“It’s coming up, you know,” she adds. “I’ve been putting off getting him something, thinking we might have proof of extraterrestrial life and I could wrap up some nice photos of it.”

“You know the drill, Jan.” Brad nods pointedly to the window to the adjacent observation room. People are watching; even the team lead needs to be careful. “No evidence leaves until the guys in charge clear it.”

Jan laughs. It’s the laugh she used when interviewing for this position, and it’s the only laugh she’s ever used around her colleagues in A.I.M. It’s easier to pass off a fake laugh as real when no one has the real one to compare it to.

“We all know the drill,” she says. “I was just thinking we’d have found it by now, and it’d be cleared for us to gather up our own subteams and study it to pieces.”

“Study it _in_ pieces,” Brad jokes.

She laughs again. It’s… _not_ funny. But, needs must. “We need to find it first.”

When Jake joins them finally and declares the subject fully prepared for them to begin, she peels back the sterile cloth covering the subject’s body. 

They stitch up the incisions more and more loosely each time, hoping to keep everything in place without promoting healing, and each time, the incisions have healed when they start the next round.

It’s probably for the best, since it indicates the subject is in proper health to be studied like this without dying, even for weeks on end if it came to that. But it does mean they need to slice him open every day, and not merely snip a few stitches and peel back the skin.

At least the subject’s bone doesn’t regrow as fast and they only needed the bone saw once. Twice, counting the skull on day two. She sets the clamp to pry and hold the two halves of the subject’s rib cage open and surveys the contents of his torso.

“I still think the liver is the best bet,” she says. “I know we turned up nothing there yesterday, but we only explored the one lobe.”

Brad nods his confirmation of her claim. “Photos show the creature seeping from his back, and I’m still betting lungs or heart, maybe spine.” 

That’s Brad, going for photographic evidence when they only have the one hard copy piece of it and everything biomechanical says brain—checked, nothing—or one of the filtration organs, a spleen or liver, possibly kidneys, which would explain the lower back.

She hopes their earlier joking that the creature is everywhere within the subject and merely moves about to avoid them is wrong. Because if that was the case, they’ll need to get a full team slicing into every part of the subject at once, and that means opening up his skull again.

Even with a surgical mask, she can do without the bone dust.

######  **BUCKY:**

**— General Hospital, Des Moines, Iowa: Late afternoon, 23 April 1982 —**

He can feel the pull of his lungs trying to knit themselves back together while the respirator continues to put them to work. 

Inhale. Tug. Tug. Exhale. Pinch. Pinch. Click goes the respirator. Inhale. Tug. Tug. Exhale— 

It does not end. None of it has any end in sight, not the bleeding or the cutting or the slicing. Not the queasy sickness of hands rearranging his insides, pulling things out and putting them in bowls, running the length of his intestines, cutting slice after slice out of his liver, shaving slivers off his heart.

No end. No beginning. Just pain on pain on pain. Bright lights against his eyelids, scratchy darkness draped over his face. The one, the other; the one, the other. Pain, pain, pain.

He will kill them all if they are doing this to Venom somewhere as well. 

He doesn’t know _how_ he’ll manage it, can’t fathom a _when_ he’ll have an opportunity, or indeed a time that is not a now composed of agony. He isn’t entirely sure _who_ they are, even—they know him as “the subject,” but someone had called him “Soldier” in that fucking bell tower, and these aren’t HYDRA; he’d know HYDRA anywhere.

Anywhere. _Where_. Another element he doesn’t know. Where the fuck is he?

But the _why_ they need to die. The _what_ he’ll do to achieve that. Those he knows. Oh, does he know them. 

He had tried, before, too early. Then came the shackles and away went the odds of success. But he’d had to try, right? 

There’s no responding voice agreeing with him or calling him a loser with all the love only the two of them can put behind the word.

Right, he answers himself in Venom’s stead. He’d had to try. He’d had to get back to Venom. Coax him out of a spider, or a bat. Or maybe a rat or mouse was running around in there. Could even be another pigeon.

He recalls trying in the bell tower itself. Recalls reaching out, grabbing for his partner. Some horrible stereo of Steve on a train and Venom in a bell tower—once reaching to be saved, once reaching to save—and losing his grip each time. 

Not managing to bridge the gap, not managing to do more than brush fingertips or clutch at a solitary inky droplet.

And now he’s as lost to Steve as Steve is to him, and Venom… 

He will not lose Venom. He will survive this, will kill who needs to be killed, will go back. Find them. Reunite. 

They belong together. He belongs to Venom; he’s known that from the beginning. It was one of the first things that beautiful death bringer told him. _I am Venom,_ they’d said. _You are mine_.

They are Venom, and he is theirs. 

These non-HYDRA researchers with their HYDRA connections, they don’t have the right to take him apart. Only Venom has that right, has the privilege of holding his organs one by one, of twining through them, poking them, taking a nibble.

But the _how_ of it. How the fuck is he going to accomplish that without waiting out a small eternity of this torture-testing? It’s all he can do to burn through the drugs binding his limbs in place trapping him paralyzed in his own mind, all he can do to hold out hope that he can put himself back together again in time to be ready and waiting for them when they come in for the next shift.

He doesn’t heal as fast without his partner. Venom is… Venom… 

It has seemed hopeless before, though he has tried. But now… Something has changed. He doesn’t know what. Something in the air, like a storm on the way, closing in swiftly but still unseen. The gust of cool air before the torrent.

He is an empty, parched stretch of rock and cracked clay, aching and open, desperate for the rain, for his partner to rejoin him. And the rain is coming. 

Yes. That is what feels different. He can sense them, like calling to like, two halves coming back together as though never split. 

That tiny dribble, the droplet, the fragment he saved in the bell tower… sliding through and around him, guided by his knowledge of the researchers’ patterns, their search. He has been protecting what little of Venom he could, and now that part is bringing the whole to him.

They are Venom, and he is theirs. 

He is Bucky, and they are his.

######  **VENOM:**

**— General Hospital, Des Moines, Iowa: Late afternoon, 23 April 1982 —**

This is the place. This is where the evidence takes them. This is where they feel their own presence the most strongly, and even if it has taken them and their whole colony of spider hosts days to reach it, they are here.

It is a facility for housing dead bodies when they are not meant to be eaten or burned or buried. A “morgue,” the sign says. 

They knew that learning to read would come in handy. Now they can find a host with a tag on its chest or at its belt that says “morgue,” and that host will be able to bring them directly to their true host, to Bucky.

Because their Bucky is far from dead, no matter what a sign says.

After accounting for the last of their pieces from the fuckity-fuck-fucking bell tower, it was easy to sense which direction the remaining pieces were—the one remaining piece, anyway.

They are not sure yet how Bucky managed to hold onto them when the entire universe was shaking apart. They will have to ask when they are joined together again. They will have to practice that, Bucky and them, together, until they can both do it completely.

_Venom. I’m right here._

Words they had not heard, but perceived, days ago in that wretched trap. Words that were as much in their mind as if they were still fully bonded to their host and surrounded by his mind. 

_I’m right here._

It still reverberates, still travels through them with desperation and longing, still says, _please, come back to me, I am a safe harbor, I will protect you._

In the tower, in the storm of vibrations and death, their Bucky had said that, had meant that. They hadn’t heard it, but some part of them, some little piece, had been able to respond to him and take shelter. 

And now the rest of them responds to that little piece. **Bucky. My host. My partner. Bucky, we are right here, and we are coming for you.**

######  **JANICE:**

**— General Hospital, Des Moines, Iowa: Evening, 23 April 1982 —**

This is further down than even the basement level of the hospital they’re working out of, an unofficial and undocumented bunker level. So it technically doesn’t need to be up to the same cleanliness standards as the part of the hospital with live patients who haven’t signed their lives away for the advancement of science.

But, she thinks as she steps on a spider, she’d like to think there’d at least be janitorial staff down regularly enough to avoid letting spiders move in.

Ugh. She can still feel it under her foot, the disgusting crunch of it, like the spider is clinging or crawling along the sole of her foot. She doesn’t need this shit.

It’s been a long workday—dawn to dusk, and even a bit longer, what with the cleanup and sewing the subject shut for the night. And she’d like to just get a shower in, eat a salad, and head to bed without dealing with spiders.

That really shouldn’t be too much to ask.

At least she doesn’t have to worry about eating dinner with the others. They’re all headed out to some steakhouse, as though they haven’t been carving up a live test subject and alien-possession victim for the last ten hours.

She? She’s eating a salad. In her room. Alone.

**Are you so sure of that?**

Janice turns around, eyes wide. No one is supposed to be down here but—

The hallway is empty, or would be empty save for a truly disturbing number of spiders that had not been there a minute ago, perched all along the walls, hanging from the ceiling in inky black webbing, and clustered on the floor. There are whole patches where the walls and floor aren’t even visible for the clumps of writhing legs.

She barely manages to open her mouth for a scream she never voices before the spiders come for her, grabbing on with pincers and mandibles, clinging to her hair, filling her mouth with a wave of black webbing that oozes together into a mass.

_Oh god, oh god, this is the alien, this is what we were looking—_

**Who.** **_Who_ ** **you were looking for.**

She tries to spit the glob out but it slinks under her tongue and then seeps into the flesh of her mouth as though it was never there. It’s… _Oh, oh god, no. It’s inside me._

Spiders fall from her body into a pile of lifeless corpses, legs folded up and bodies shriveled like a pile of raisins. She manages a few steps away from them, leaving a trail of dead spiders and loose webbing in her wake.

“Oh god,” she whimpers, wanting to scream and yet barely able to whisper from the horror of it all. “No. Please no. Not me. Not _me._ ”

 **Why not you?** Laughter. Dark and deep and wet laughter. Angry laughter. And so, so genuine.

The webbing engulfs the remaining spiders and then creeps toward her, moving by throwing out strings of itself and pulling the rest of its mass along. And while she’d like to run, she can’t so much as lift a foot to avoid it crawling over her shoe and up her leg, sinking through her pants at the knee and joining the rest of its mass.

**You found me.**

There’s someone, something, crawling through her brain, picking at her memories, learning what she knows… and it is furious.

**You made a terrible mistake playing hide and seek. Might even be your last one.**

“I’m so sorry,” she whispers. “I didn’t— I— They said he was a volunteer. A lunatic. A violent—” 

Her mouth won’t move, her tongue and jaw locked into silence.

**Where is my host? You will take me to him. If you do as you are directed, you might yet survive this.**

She does want to survive. She’ll take this thing anywhere it wants to go if she’ll just live through the experience. 

**But I warn you,** comes the voice, even darker and wetter now, like it’s drooling right into her ears, both of them at the same time in a voracious surround sound. **Your pancreas… It is so tender. And delicious. Juicy. And I have not eaten in days.**

She swallows, nods her head. And now she can speak again, whatever grasp the alien had on her face loosened. The hatred and fury still remains, though, a raging inferno that wants nothing more than to devour her alive from the inside out.

“I’ll just… I’ll need to…” Her mind races. How does she survive this and then continue surviving it? “In order to get us through security. I need to drop something off in my room so that I can pretend I forgot it in the operating room.”

**Torture chamber.**

She staggers under the pressure of that rage. 

“They swore,” she whispers, focusing on placing one foot in front of the other without holding onto the wall for support. “He was under. He didn’t feel it. They swore.”

**They lied. _You_ lie. Hurry up.**

She _didn’t_ lie. They did tell her that, they— She feels the pressure lessen and then disappear, presumably the alien withdrawing from her thoughts and staring hungrily at her pancreas. 

It’s true, though. She told it the truth… But maybe she has been lying to herself all this time.

The little flinches when the door opened, or when the sheet lifted, or when they cut him, even though Jake assured her the subject is out, is under, isn’t feeling a thing. Just muscle spasms. He’s not conscious or anything. 

The way the subject’s pulse raced and his brain waves were pure chaos when they were working on him, and still far more active than they should be when they weren’t. She doesn’t specialize in neurology, but that spoke to consciousness.

On some level, she must have known the subject was paralyzed, not anesthetized. Was awake, aware, trapped. But he was enhanced, had signed up for it. He could survive that, was designed to survive that, was housing the future of this planet… 

They’d thought. But he hadn’t; he was empty. Now _she_ houses it, and she’s _not_ designed to survive being sliced open and cut to pieces ten hours a day, day after day. The only way she survives this is if she can give this alien what it wants and be released. Go into hiding. Do anything to avoid being chopped up by her own colleagues.

Somehow, she makes it to her room without getting stopped and flings her clipboard with her field notes onto her bunk. After a second’s thought, she pulls the blanket over it. That’ll pass any cursory inspection. They won’t do more than glance to see if she is here at first, thinking her a hostage.

And if they find her missing along with the subject and decide to cut their losses for a short while, at least they will have her notes. It might help buy her time.

######  **VENOM:**

**— General Hospital, Des Moines, Iowa: Evening, 23 April 1982 —**

It takes considerable effort not to flood this host’s mental faculties with everything they think and feel about her, her colleagues, what they’ve been doing to their Bucky, and all the pent up anxiety of not being with their perfect host.

Perfectly paranoid, just like them. And still missing something in that bell tower. 

They’ve had days to think of what it could be, and days to lament not knowing. He’d checked it even more thoroughly than they’d thought it needed to be checked, and still.

It makes the sudden compliance of their current host incredibly suspect.

Is it their turn to miss something despite combing through her thoughts? No. Surely not. This host is a paltry shamble of semi-tasty organs in a fleshy sack. She can hide nothing from them, and cannot hear them unless they project into her thoughts.

To think, now that they know how to take a human host without killing it, this might have been all there was to inhabit on the planet if their beloved Soldier hadn’t come along. Dull, dying human after dull, dying human, each lasting hours or a day, each an entity practically foreign despite such close cohabitation.

Nothing like their host, their Soldier, their Bucky. 

The mere thought of nothing as a replacement, of losing their host to these researchers, of having nothing left but to climb, empty, from host to host… They would simply reach out to their team lead and be done with it. No host could compare.

And leaving this particular sub-par host alone long enough has allowed her to make her feverish way back down the halls she came from, to badge in, to badge in a second time, to wave the badge at the human guard and mutter that she’ll forget her own head next. So much security.

She won’t forget her own head, though. They will eat it. 

Either from the inside out, like they are doing with all the rest of her tasty little snacks, or from the outside in, with a glorious chomp of vengeance. How dare she cut open their partner, their host, their Bucky.

No. Her colleagues lied to her, she lied to herself, and they lied, too— This woman, this torture-tester, is not going to live through this. No matter how well-behaved a lamb she is when walking into the slaughterhouse. 

######  **JANICE:**

**— General Hospital, Des Moines, Iowa: Evening, 23 April 1982 —**

She peeks through the window into the operating room, her eyes aching from being open and wanting nothing more than to slide shut. How is she so tired after so short a time? Why does she feel so drained when she should still be wired by all that is happening?

The subject is as she left him, stretched out on the operating table, sheet pulled up all the way over his head and obscuring the respirator tubing. No one has come by and taken up a night shift of hacking him open, no one has gone after his skull again, no one has untidied what she had put into place.

 _Good_ , she thinks. Good because she’d sewn him up neatly, arranged the sheet to cover him nicely, had adjusted the IV catheter to pull a little less at the site where it’s healed into the subject’s remaining arm.

Or, maybe not good. Maybe if someone else had come and done more damage, she would be off the hook for what she’d done previously.

**Open the door. Go inside. Open. Open the door. Get inside. Go.**

She swallows and puts a hand on the door. Everything hurts, like this thing is eating her alive, piece by piece. But it had said…

“You… you said I could live.” She’s got to get that confirmed. It’s not too late to turn around, or call for help. “That I would s-survive this if I cooperated. I— I’ve cooper—”

**OPEN. The DOOR.**

She sways on her feet under the weight of the impatience, nearly falls, and uses the motion to push the door open. 

The result is an open door, but also that she lands sprawled out on the tile, gasping at its chill smoothness against her cheek. _When did this fever start? Have I been ill, is this— Oh god it is, isn’t it? The alien. The subject’s fever, oh my god, oh my—_

Her thoughts are derailed by the sensation of something hot and sticky slipping up her throat just as it had moved in the hallway, flinging a tentacle forward and dragging itself behind, a whole webwork of tiny strands catching at the back of her throat.

And then it’s pouring out of her mouth, a black mass of globules and bubbles, stretched thin in places and bulging in others. It’s taking with it everything warm, everything moist, her mouth is so dry, her throat so parched, the pit of her so cold and empty.

“Y-you…” she gasps as she tries to drag herself forward after it with arms that are suddenly too weak to lift herself. “P— Please, you…”

The alien drags itself across the tile more effectively with its tiny tentacles and grappling fronds than she manages to do with both arms and then surges upward under the sheet.

The subject spasms and jerks under the sheet and then lies still once more.

“Y-you pro—” She sucks in a wheezing gasp. “Prom…”

The world goes black.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content Warnings: Torture-testing as described by a researcher, indication of impending (and previous) vivisections. Nothing too graphic, but worth warning for. Also, so very many _more_ spiders than last chapter.


	13. Consentacles: The Magical Healing Cock

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Omg, we're getting so close to the end, that makes me so sad...

######  **BUCKY:**

**— General Hospital, Des Moines, Iowa: Evening, 23 April 1982 —**

Closer. The storm is getting closer. It’ll be a doozy. Flooding the streets, sending branches crashing down from tree after tree.

The pain is still fierce, the coldness, the emptiness. He can feel the tube grating against his throat while his bones grate together with every breath, dislodging ever so slightly the two halves of his sternum.

There is the warm fragment of his partner, lurking safely coiled around the tendons in his left calf, shivering and shuddering even as his torn muscles shiver closer together, shudder as they intertwine fiber along fiber to prepare for the next attempt to throw off the chemical shackles that trap him. 

He will survive this, will heal, will be reunited with his partner over each and every one of their dead bodies. If that means he must nurture this huddled, terrified fragment into full health, if that means he has to eat every last liver in this whole building, right out of their sides, he will do it.

If this is the last of his Venom… if what he has rescued is all that there is… 

These researchers and the assholes who sent them will suffer. They will pay. They will die, and it will be as messy and horrible as he can make it.

But the tiny fragment might not be the last… The storm is coming, thunder gathering and approaching, and here is the cool breeze as the door slams open and someone thumps to the floor in a heap.

His storm is here! Safe and whole and tolerably well-fed by the feel of it, and— 

The freezing pain and misery of the last few days is not so much erased as flooded over with soothing heat and the prickle of healing that comes with the single most positive element in his life.

_Missed you, goo-baby._

**The insults! The insults never stop!**

But Venom twines one by one around his assorted injuries with a peculiarly tender urgency, as though afraid their ministrations could do more harm than good. Worry. They were worried about him, are still worried about him. This many injuries at one time is unheard of in their experience.

He wishes it was unheard of in his own experience, but this last however long has smacked of Zola through and through. Early days after the fall.

 _Sorry, my love._ Bucky lies back with a smile that’s purely internal, letting every part of himself relax against the table. What he means, of course, is “I love you more,” because what _they_ mean is “I love you, too.” And that is an exchange he’d started to fear he would never again have.

The tiny fragment of his partner he’d managed to save in the bell tower had been too small, too fragile, had not contained enough of Venom’s mass to converse with him or even to convey much more than their fear and vulnerability.

There’d been an echo of the bond he shares with Venom, but only that, only a faint impression. Far more urgent had been the need to flee from those hunting the little one down, the need to provide that shelter as promised. 

But now… Now the whole, now the reunion, now the—

**Now the avalanche of sentimental slop?**

_Yes, actually. Now the avalanche of sentimental slop. Until you drown in it, you beautiful—_

**If you do not stop, I will revive the woman host and live with her for a while. There is still some of her left.**

_Sure you will._

He is feeling whole enough now to move, because the goal now is escape, is flee the scene, abandon the area and plan their own move. He can’t risk his partner again, not when they’ve only just been joined together.

_Shackles?_

**Patience, dear.**

_They know your vulnerabilities,_ he insists. _And some of mine. Revenge has to wait until we can be sure they won’t succeed this time around._

**We are yours. They cannot succeed. Cannot tear us from you. We know that. The little one has shown us.**

_At least to take the tubing out?_ He asks. _Also, nice plural, there. Is that a new thing? Going forward?_

A moment’s hesitation, more confusion than anything washing over him, and then the shackles are torn open by a series of tendrils that soon turn their attention instead to caressing his skin and assessing for further damage.

 _Thanks, sweetheart._ He lifts his arm and drags the respirator tube free from his throat, ignoring the ripping sensation of flesh adhering to plastic with practice vaguely remembered from long before. 

That’s not the sensation he wants to focus on: Venom seems confused about themself—or maybe now themselves?—and that is worth ironing out while he works on getting fully free of all the wires and tubing. 

_I don’t mind the plural,_ he murmurs into their mental connection as he deals with the IV catheter and the far less pleasant catheter further down. _I know I kind of freaked out the first time, when I thought you might be a lot of yous, but that was a first. I didn’t know you, then. Not well._

 **It is a new thing,** Venom finally responds. **But it is not going forward.**

He gets a mental image of what has to be every spider in that bell tower, each with a pair of white crescent eyes along its bulbous belly and legs longer and blacker than natural.

_You used… all of the spiders? As a host? A host colony, herd, swarm? Whatever that many spiders in a group is called._

**A nightmare of spiders.**

_I don’t think that’s right._

**So look it up when we’re out of here. The woman was horrified.**

_No one appreciates beauty anymore._

**Again with the sappy sentiment. It is worse than the insults.**

######  **VENOM:**

**— General Hospital, Des Moines, Iowa: Evening, 23 April 1982 —**

It is concerning that their host is not yet speaking to them, despite his throat being healed up. They do good work, and quickly, and have many tendrils and feelers they can thread in and among the tissues of a host.

And it is Bucky’s nature to talk, to chatter, to share these thoughts with the world and not just with them.

It has gotten them many strange looks over the years.

Perhaps that is why he does not speak now. They would not get strange looks, but suspicious looks. 

_They’ll be suspicious as hell about a dude in a morgue sheet and nothing else searching for some clothes in the sublevels, sweetheart,_ their host thinks. _Don’t need to talk to get the wrong kind of attention._

**We will be noticed anyway? Then why not talk? Your throat is now uninjured, and your vocal cords nicely restored. Is there pain? If there is lingering pain…**

_I’m good, doll. We just need to be as quiet as we can until we find someone to impersonate. Grab their clothes, and—_

**The problem is your skin showing?**

_That’s part of it. The whole “only have the one arm and am riddled with surgical scars” part doesn’t help._

**We should find your arm. I will make you a new one for now, and…** They slip out through Bucky’s skin—sadly still showing all the signs of his ordeal because of his stupid, prideful need to wear the proof— 

_Not stupid. But yeah, prideful as fucking hell. Also what are you_ doing? _We can’t go fully bonded physical form in a hospital corridor,_ he insists. _That’s the furthest thing from what anyone’s expecting to find down here!_

They let their actions speak for them, crafting a pair of black jeans with some white edging along the seams and a black t-shirt with the left sleeve pinned up because their host is weird about some things, like removing evidence of injuries survived. Black shoes—

_Boots, please._

—Black boots with white laces. Yes. This will do. And a hat. **And you can drop the sheet wherever you like. Unless you need to keep it as proof?**

 _Har, har. Just for that, maybe I_ will _keep it._

Bucky does not keep the sheet, but instead uses it to strangle one of the researchers—Jake, he remembers from the woman’s mind—while Venom bites the head off the other. Brad.

That leaves… Many. Bucky’s mind supplies voices and sometimes names for two dozen more. They can easily eat two dozen more, but not before an alarm is triggered.

And while the littlest fragment that has most recently reassimilated into the whole—they are nowhere near prepared to be a progenitor—has adapted to find safety in a host instead of fleeing a host at deadly vibrations… 

Bucky is right: It is better to escape than to test their luck with that adaptation.

Lately, their luck has sucked.

######  **BUCKY:**

**— Motel 6 just outside of Des Moines, Iowa: Later evening, 23 April 1982 —**

He tosses the motel room, somewhat awkwardly with just the one arm, more looking for surveillance than anything like inspecting the amenities. Fucking has a door, door locks alright, that’s good enough for them. Sure, it’s a bit of a rundown shack, but it’s not like they have any of their equipment on hand, including a wallet or any identification. 

So a shack, rundown or not, is way better than a culvert drain and having to hope no one decides to take them in for loitering. 

It’s not like they haven’t had far worse accommodations when running from HYDRA toward the beginning, or even far more recently than that. You can’t really call a metal table in a bright, tiled room comfortable, especially when the bed comes with metal restraints.

This place has a pullout sofa that makes noise when he looks at it, let alone tries to lie down on it. 

God. He’s going to have to lie down again. If not tonight, then sometime. And probably sometime soon. They haven’t eaten well enough to sustain this healing without at least some rest.

**You are hesitating. I know you require a meal, but—**

“No, no. I couldn’t eat anything yet. It would be miserable with a fresh set of guts. Need to break them in slow. Tomorrow morning,” he adds. “We’ll get some muffins. Chocolate.” 

He sits down on the edge of the bed to the tune of a thousand springs. So far, so good, despite the irritating noise. Keep it together. Don’t worry his partner.

**I am very perceptive.**

Bucky sighs. “It’s nothing, love. I’m just going to have a hard time sleeping, is all. I’m not looking forward to it.”

**But I am here, and I will help. If you cannot fall asleep on your own, I can make y—**

Venom cuts themself off, seeming to sense something and come to a different conclusion. **No,** they say. **You would not like that. I see now. That is too much like what they did.**

Well, at least he doesn’t have to say it. “You’d think I’d be used to this, just from all the times something similar happened before.”

**But we learned of those times from reading the files. About your ribs, and the metalwork. The rejection and regrowth.**

And wasn’t that pleasant? To read about how they tried to wrap a few ribs in metal sheeting for a better scaffolding for the metal arm. About how he’d rejected it, pushing the metal out in shreds through his skin over the course of a month. 

About how those ribs had grown stronger in response.

About how they’d all thought that was an excellent development, one they wanted to see again, one that gave them sufficient reason to perform the same procedure on all of his ribs on the left side, and his spine, clavicle, scapula…

Bucky takes a deep breath into lungs that still feel incomplete and lets it out slowly. He needs to rest, try to regain some balance, do his part to help them get from a place of danger to a place they can strike back from.

“I almost hate to ask, but…” He lies back on the crappy pull-out mattress with the springs they could hear from space. “Could you have another go at ransacking my body and inspecting every little bit?”

Outrage, concern. Anger on his behalf. Even a bit of jealousy, which makes no sense whatsoever.

**Are you in pain? Did I miss a spot?**

“No, and no. I just can’t stop feeling the other.”

 **The other** — **where they cut you open.**

And there’s the deadpan challenge to his effort at minimalizing injuries; he’d been missing that.

 **And sliced up your beautiful plump organs** , they continue. **And sewed things back together like sloppy children playing with sticks and yarn. All your delectable insides.**

_Now who’s getting sappy?_

Venom refuses to rise to the bait, more’s the pity.

**That is pain. Feeling that is feeling pain. You should not be in pain. I have healed you.**

“I’m just… remembering it,” he explains. It’s not real pain. Just imagined pain. Fucking hard to put into words, really. But he tries. 

“Kind of like how I keep thinking I have an arm over there, but it’s just a bag of scraps we grabbed until I figure out how to reassemble it. Not a real arm, and not even attached.”

**Phantom pain is still pain.**

“Okay. You’re right. I yield.” He rubs at his eyes with his remaining hand. 

Fuck. They are going to stand out so much. One-armed dude looking like defrosted shit not even fully warmed over and paying with cash. This’ll be the last chance they get to rest until they demonstrate for this new enemy why not to fuck with them. And he’s wasting that time.

“I’m hurting, sweetheart,” he finally admits. “I’m hurting so bad. The damage is done, it’s over with, it’s gone. But I can’t stop feeling it. Every time I let my mind wander, it wanders right back there, to that fucking metal table and the—”

 **Torture-testers,** they growl deep and wet in his mind. **We will kill and eat them all. Rip them to pieces. But in reverse order.**

He feels a rush of rage and more of that bizarre misplaced jealousy with the words, but then another rush, this one of warmth and nurturing and a sort of cocoon that doesn’t restrict so much as shield.

**You are mine. No one else can have your organs. No one else can even touch them. Or look at them.**

_Ah, so that’s where the jealousy comes in. Logical._

If he were feeling any more put together—ha—he might point out that there are a few organs he’d quite _like_ someone to take a look at and maybe even have a grope or two on. But facts are still facts: Anyone he got close enough to to make time with is going to have to be okay making time with Venom, too.

There’s just no hiding them, and he doesn’t want to hide them. Except from those interested in hurting them. 

But who’s going to look at Venom and see the gorgeous killing tools at their disposal, the sleek and liquid beauty of their form, the versatility and every other little thing that makes them a perfect darling of an extraterrestrial life partner?

All the media he’s picked up indicate that not many would fit that bill, and most would be terrified, horrified, appalled. They don’t know what they’re missing, but they are entirely and stupidly content to be missing it.

And after pointing all this out and getting chided for sentiment, the jealousy would bubble back to the surface, the indignation that no other human on this planet would be interested in joining them that way—Bucky, Venom, or the both of them. 

Then the insistence that he doesn’t need some other human, he has Venom. The timid offer of help. The churning interest hidden so badly behind that offer that it’s almost advertised. 

**I am not the only one of us who cannot keep their thoughts to themselves.**

_True, love, but I don’t even try, most of the time. You try and try, and I still end up knowing all the juicy details._

**Your organs are all in place and repaired.** So prim and proper. All it’s missing is a sniff and a pointedly offended and unnecessary throat-clearing sound. 

_Such a melodramatic goo-baby._

Venom pretends—badly, as usual—not to have heard it. **They are as plump as they ever were. They will only stay plump if you rest now, and eat later. But soon.**

“Right,” he murmurs, and clutches at the arm Venom wraps loosely around his torso. “Think you can manage both a head and shoulders?”

Venom does him one better and extends their form to an entire torso, one arm held around his waist and the other threading talons through his hair. **“I am here. I have you. You are mine.”**

He smiles. “And you’re mine.”

######  **VENOM:**

**— Motel 6 just outside of Des Moines, Iowa: Morning, 23 April 1982 —**

As they are leaving the next morning—and as Bucky is focused on selecting a car to steal—a snack presents itself with a chuckle.

“Damn, all that noise and with just the one arm.”

**Snack?**

_Unwitting car donor._

**And snack?**

_No._

Bucky smirks over his shoulder at the man. “What can I say? I got great staying power and a whole bottle of lotion to use up.”

They share a laugh, the not-a-snack and Bucky. But their Bucky’s laughter has no mirth inside; only outside. 

**I do not understand. That man found it funny. You did not, and yet it was you who told the joke.**

_I was tossing and turning so much the springs sounded like sex, V. He thought I was jerking off all night._

**Why would that have been funny? You** **_do_ ** **jerk off all night sometimes. Sometimes I help. It is fun, but not funny.**

 _Now I can’t tell whether_ you’re _trying to be funny._

**I am hilarious. The very most funny.**

They consider some of Bucky’s thoughts last night. The way he thought they were timid when offering to join in. Maybe that is not a time to pause and add hesitation between words. It is so hard to tell sometimes.

 **But I am not joking,** they continue. **I would like to help more often. To join in. The sensations you pass along are delicious.**

 _Yeah? Bet they’re better than last night’s sensations._ Bucky slips through the parking lot to the not-a-snack’s car once the man himself is inside. 

**Last night you were hurting. In your head and heart and in the rest of you. When we are manipulating your reproductive organs, you—**

“Okay, come on,” Bucky mutters as he checks the doors and trunk. “You can’t say ‘jerk off’ one minute and go full speed ‘oh, I am an alien and do not understand your kind’ the next.”

The trunk opens easily and Venom slinks inside and unlocks the driver’s door for him.

“Cock’ll do just fine, if you gotta,” Bucky says as he slides into the car and tosses the sack with his metal arm into the passenger seat. 

He leans down to hotwire the car and avoid being seen out the window until they are ready to drive. “Or dick,” he adds. “That’d be fine, too.”

**Massage your meat stick? Choke your chicken?**

“Wow. Now I _know_ you’re trying to be funny.” He puts the car in drive and heads for their nearest safehouse.

**I would never joke about meat sticks. Or chickens.**

And now their Bucky is feeling the humor, is feeling their warmth and connection. And not feeling the cold, latex-gloved hands of others sliding around inside. 

That will do very nicely.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content Warnings: The warnings from last chapter still apply (except for the spiders), but this time we’re putting things back together! ^_^ Also, allusions to masturbation and tentacle shenanigans.


	14. All Your Base Are Belong To Us!

######  **BUCKY:**

**— Lakeside A.I.M. research facility, upstate California, USA: Just before dawn, 12 May 1982 —**

Whelp, this is it, then. A.I.M. base number one, extensively cased, connections to HYDRA traced, connections from HYDRA to traitorous client determined… And trap within a trap set. 

So they are having a gathering of their scientists? Sounds like a trap. So they are being careless in their communications with said scientists, allowing dates and times to slip through to the public in seemingly obvious coded messages? Looks like a trap.

And if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck… But even if it’s a legitimate set of circumstances that puts all these targets in one place at one time, and not a trap meant to draw him and Venom in, it’s still going to be a trap—just one he and Venom are setting. 

Have been setting. Are ready to spring. All their research in order, all their plans fallen into place, all their ducks lined up neat and tidy.

Time to blow this joint sky high and scatter the wreckage far and wide. Eat any survivors. No one, but  _ no one _ , is escaping this. Everyone involved enough with A.I.M.’s space projects to be in this research facility will die a fiery nightmare death being burned alive or else crushed in the flaming rubble. 

If they make it out of that, they’ll die in pieces when he and Venom come to clean up their mess. 

**There are no ducks in the lake.**

“Figure of speech, love.”

**Always with the figures of speech.**

“Always with the pretending you don’t know what the figures of speech mean.”

**…It is time to set up your precious C4 now. It is not time to be pointedly perceptive.**

“Agreed.” 

This is probably meant to be a trap for  _ them _ , all these researchers gathered in one place. It’s meant to lure them into the building, to get them to hunt scientists up and down the hallways like so many rats scurrying in tunnels.

It might have worked if they hadn’t been expecting it. It might have worked if that was their style. But neither is the case, and now the trap is turned around to be sprung on those who set it.

All those tasty bait morsels will just be charred cinders soon enough. It’s the least they can do in thanks for all that tender loving vivisection they’d offered him.

_ The trick, _ he thinks,  _ is to be in place before they arrive, so that we can be sure they do arrive and we’re not going to put ourselves at risk for nothing. _

**The other trick is to set them on fire as loudly as we can from a safe spot.**

_ That, too.  _ He places another payload at the base of a support structure, his right hand and Venom’s left making quick work of the task.

They’ve got to at least make this first move before trying to reassemble the metal arm from the instructions in the red book. He’s not willing to risk leading anyone to the safe deposit boxes with the scattered pages of that thing, not until he knows full well that the risk is miniscule and easily countered. 

Until then, it’s long sleeves, gloves, and an arm made entirely of Venom themself, moving so in concert with his own thinking that it’s like having the metal arm back, or even his old flesh and blood arm—though he’d be lying if he said he remembers what it was like to have that one.

Bucky tags this batch of C4 with their remote detonator and a signal wire. Because a good explosion is a distant explosion where Venom is concerned, and he’s not willing to put his partner through any undue stress at this point. 

Even if there are some aspects of his partner that honestly don’t mind and might even look forward to the blast. Still, helps that they’re setting this stuff off from a way off, and that they split up to cover more ground. 

They haven’t actually split up, of course. Not him from Venom or Venom from him. On the one hand, parting from Venom would be foolish. On the other hand… it would be terrifying. Some terrifying things are worth doing for the benefits, but terrifying and stupid? Pass.

No, it’s Venom who’s split up, this time sectioning off a few pieces of themself and setting up camp in a number of crows to keep a watch on their prey and ensure no one slips out unmurdered. 

That thing with the spiders was an unfortunate necessity, but also a valuable discovery. The fact that it might have meant he spent a few days essentially pregnant with Venom’s offshoot is a little weird, but he ultimately doesn’t mind. He was able to keep them hidden and that’s what matters.

Anyway, if anyone was going to knock him up, as humanly impossible as that would be, he’d want it to be Venom.

**Flattering. But I do not plan to become a progenitor. A loser should not make more losers.**

_ Yeah, I bet I’d make a pretty shitty dad, too. _

**Always blowing up joints and killing people without eating all of their tasty inner tidbits first. So wasteful. Such a terrible example for Blobby Blabbersnoot Bubblesworth the billionth.**

_ Billionth? You’ve got a bit of an overestimation problem there, sweetheart. I think a billion little blobbies would kill me for sure. _

**Maybe only a junior, then. Though an offshoot would mature in a separate host, not my own.**

Fascinating concept. Maybe that’s how the whole “take over the planet” thing was supposed to go. Eh, something to contemplate at a different point in time.

_ Whatever you say, Bubblesworth the first. Just tell a girl before you go getting her in trouble, you hear? _

Laughter, deep and echoing but also sharply accompanied by the cawing of a dozen glossy crows in the distance. Nice to know a bird host appreciates a joke. Not like a rabbit. They’d just twitch their noses and slink away.

**Rabbits. Still with the rabbits. Over a decade, and rabbits.**

Bucky places one last bit of C4 and slinks away toward their observation deck of forked branches near the top of a very tall tree a good way off.

_ There’s nothing wrong with thinking about rabbits. _ And anyway, he doesn’t do it nearly as often as accused. _ That last debacle got me thinking about those lab rabbits again, is all. _

The response is quiet, a bit subdued and heavily tinged with regret.  **You should not have—**

_ None of that, love. Shit happened. That’s what shit does. Your instinct told you to flee, and you did. That’s just natural. _

**I abandoned you.**

_ No. No you didn’t. You came to me when I called. When I offered shelter, you took shelter. When I needed help, you helped. _

**I will not abandon you again.**

Bucky sighs, but knows better than to argue that there is no “again” if there’s been no first time.  _ I believe you _ , he thinks instead.  _ I trust you. It’s you and me, love, all the way to the end. _

**To the end of what?**

_ I have no idea. It’s a— _

**Figure of speech.**

He grins. “Well, see?  _ Now  _ you’ve got it.”

Bucky lets Venom propel them up the tree, and his grin turns vicious when he looks out over the stretch of bramble from their treetop perch.

“Now let’s get some revenge.”

**I want to push the button.**

“That’s new. You sure? It’s going to be a lot of noise, and some fire. Might be better keeping back and I’ll warn you like usual.”

**I want to push the button. I** **_need_ ** **to.**

“…You got it, love.”

######  **VENOM:**

**— A.I.M. command base, Middle of nowhere, Oklahoma, USA: Around noon, 29 May 1982 —**

Pushing buttons is fun. They are beginning to see why their host relishes these opportunities.

This is the fifth A.I.M. base, and the fifth button they are pressing. It is  _ great  _ fun to be responsible for the screams of dying enemies and the smells of burning meat and the vibrations of so much noise. But also—and more importantly—it is less and less terrifying each time.

That first time, they had almost scattered again, had been partly torn away from their Bucky, but had managed to cling to the small part of themself that was latched on and refused to budge. Such a dear, little Bubblesworth Junior, to teach them how to hide so deep within their host’s tissues that even deadly vibrations can do nothing to shake them loose.

They are nothing if not adaptable, and this is an adaptation that they should have been working on from the beginning. After all, in the very beginning, Bucky had set the C4 and pressed the button. Had lit up the evening sky in reds and yellows and burned the horizon along with the facility the researchers had held them in.

And he had said that he would not stop. Has been true to his word. All those opportunities to embrace the noise and vibration and fire, and all of them untaken. Tragic, that.

But they are rectifying the mistake.

Because they are not only a source of strength for their partner, but also a source of weakness. And they will neither abandon their host again nor cause their host to falter in the heat of battle. 

And they have been succeeding. By the fourth explosive button press, the basement of some bank that was not really a bank, they merely flinched outward and away from the source of the noise, and then settled back into place. 

Success. And destruction. So much destruction.

This time, hardly even a flinch. And this time, so. much. destruction. 

From such a safe distance, even a large fire like this one billowing into the midnight sky is beautiful to observe. Like a liquid of gold and yellow and orange, crawling upward and outward, collapsing inward upon itself. The crackle and pop, the random secondary explosions from within.

Knowing that the fire has swallowed up the dying, agonized screams of the ones who torture-tested their host, that they have put those researchers through terror and pain, can inflict their own weaknesses—the fire and the sonic vibrations—on others out of spite any time they go to the trouble setting up the C4… 

Yes, pressing the button is great fun.

“Glad you like it, doll. You ready to let me press a few now? Maybe next time?”

**You would like to get your own revenge as well. I understand.**

“Oh, no. Far be it from me to deny you the thrill of torching our enemies.” Bucky laces his fingers in with theirs and runs his thumb across the back of their constructed hand. “But I think A.I.M. has figured it out.”

**Figured what out? That we will kill them all?**

“Yes, exactly. This is the fifth time we’ve tracked them down and destroyed years of work, set them back, all that.”

**You do not think they have suffered** **_enough_ ** **, do you?** Surely not. Their beloved host is as vicious and violent as they are, a perfect match, will never be satisfied until the entire organization is ash and rubble.

“No,” Bucky says, confirming their assumption. “But I think we hit HYDRA next.”

**Hmm.**

He does have a point. Bucky tends to have a lot of those, and they tend to be good ones. They have not been going after HYDRA, even though HYDRA is the group that sent their client to set a trap. Perhaps they are feeling neglected, or… Perhaps they are feeling safe. And that will never do.

**Yes,** they agree.  **HYDRA must be thinking we have been put off the scent. But we will kill them, too.**

“Starting with our dear client.”

Oh, the anger and thirst for revenge. Oh, the glee at having let her think that they do not know she was behind it. The thrill of keeping track of her movements and letting her believe that she is safe, has successfully fled their revenge, will escape with her life.

It floods through to them from Bucky, and meets the same coming from them. Mingles, like with like, perfect mirror images of two vengeful losers.

**Yes. Starting with our client.**

Except… Death by fire does not seem right for her. They will let Bucky push the button for her if that is what he wants, but… 

“We’ll pay her a visit and explain ourselves before you eat her, love. That woman deserves a personal touch.”

**Excellent.**

######  **KAREN:**

**— High-rise apartment, New York City, USA: Before dawn, 15 June 1982 —**

The news has become far from enlightening, these past few weeks. Every time she turns on the television, it seems another factory has encountered a fatal accident and been utterly destroyed by explosion and fire. Another office building or bank or farmhouse suffered an electrical short of some sort and met a fiery end with all the people inside.

And every once in a while, there is footage of a man picking through the rubble and doing… something; it’s always unclear. Every once in a while, the bodies intact enough to retrieve without falling apart into clumps of charred bone and ash… are missing their heads.

She would stop checking the news first thing every morning, would spare her nerves, but she can’t shake the feeling that the one time she doesn’t check is the one time the news will be featuring her.

At the very least, she’s moved her television to the other room so she can’t watch it before bed or while in bed. She’s already got enough nightmares as it is.

She rubs at her eyes and then ties her robe around her waist before wandering into the other room to flip on the television. And she would reach for the remote and press that button, but there is a man sitting at her breakfast bar, perched on a stool with a cup from her own cabinet in his hand.

His right hand. His singular hand. Because the left is an empty sleeve, where before there was metal.

She has not watched the news yet today. And it  _ will  _ feature her.  _ There are some things in life you’d like to be wrong about _ , she thinks.  _ Damn. _

“Good morning,” Jimmy Varnes says with a slow smile she’d prayed she would never see again. “You know what day it is?”

Her voice won’t work for a long, terrifying moment, mostly because her lungs have frozen in fear. Finally, after a minute in which she could swear he was watching the gears turn, she manages a reply.

“I am so sorry. They blackm—”

“It’s our anniversary,” he says through a grin that promises exactly the sort of celebration she won’t live through. 

An inky black trail of slime seeps out of his empty sleeve, dripping thickly downward and joined by more of the same until something like an arm is formed. The proto-arm swells grotesquely until it fills out into an arm to match the flesh and blood arm on the man’s other side.

“H-hap—” She swallows. “Happy ann— anniversary.” Maybe if she plays along. Maybe if she can convince him that they made her do what she did, that they forced her hand, that she would never have betrayed him like that if it hadn’t been for the secrets and her reputation. The threats.

“Thanks,” comes the reply. “We’ve got a great day planned for it, you know. Wining, dining, maybe some dancing. It’s going to be a great time. You’re coming along for the party, you know.”

His voice is warm, jocular, pleasant. But his eyes are so cold as they run from her hair, all pinned up on top of her head for the night, to her slippered feet. 

Predatory, but not as a man lurking in the darkness leering at her would be predatory. No, this is predatory in the classic sense of a large beast preparing to rip its prey to shreds and bury its snout in the innards to gorge itself on its still-twitching kill.

Will he set her on fire? Blow up her apartment? Shoot her in the head?  _ Wining and dining. Maybe dancing. _ Will he feed her poison and watch her twitch and shake to death?

Hire an assassin and you never know exactly what you’ll get other than a dead target.  _ Betray  _ an assassin… 

She swallows again. 

“Can I explain, first?”

He lifts the coffee mug in her direction, takes a sip. “Sure. I’d love to hear all about it.”

She opens her mouth and words pour out. She tells him about her family, the secrets. Her career and ambitions. The other secrets. The way she needed that man dead. The way she’d hired him to see to it. The way she fully intended to pay him and be done with it.

And she would continue to ramble, to tell him about the second layer of blackmail that only got announced after they’d signed the contract—

But there is a series of snaking vines emerging from the man’s right shoulder, curling and extending, twining in and around and through each other like liquid tar floating in the air… And forming a head of some sort with hideous, jagged, dripping teeth and eyes that swirl around into crescents tipped with points as sharp as those teeth.

And her voice leaves her once more.

**“I am bored with this, dear.”** The head… talks. The mouth composes words dripping with slick globules of saliva. **“Can I eat her yet?”**

“Patience, darling.” Varnes gives the head a loving stroke, as though it is not the most disturbing sight on this planet, as though it is not all of her half-glimpsed nightmares rolled into one unspeakable monstrosity, as though it is not everything wrong gathered into one place. 

Darling? Dear? … _ Anniversary? _

Then, to her: “I just want to know one more thing. What did you  _ think  _ would happen when you changed your side of the deal from ‘you kill him and I’ll pay you’ to ‘you kill him and I set you up to get taken away and carved up for the rest of time,’ hm?”

“I— I—”

“Right.” He sets the coffee mug on the counter. “Soup’s up, sweetheart.”

The head slips back inside Varnes’s shoulder and then the black slime of the left arm travels along his torso and then spreads to engulf him utterly, until there is no man sitting on a stool at her breakfast bar, but a hulking black beast in the rough shape of a man lashing a tongue like a red snake from its mouth.

**“Rub-a-dub dub,”** comes the echoing rumble from that glistening, slimy maw.  **“Thanks for the grub.”**

She screams.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content Warnings: The vaguest of allusions to mpreg, some joking about the same, but nothing of the sort is happening here, except by the most technical of technicalities. What _is_ happening is explosions and murder, so, content warnings for canon-typical violence/cannibalism, I guess. ^_^


	15. Omake in three parts

### Fix-it

######  **VENOM:**

**— Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA: Near midnight, 20 June 1982 —**

Their host flexes the metal arm, making the servos purr and whirr and carry on. They shiver at the rush of prickly, barely there electric pops and fizzles that zip from the metal arm up through the connections into their host’s delectable brain.

“Delectable, huh?”

**I have never hidden how nutritious and tasty your organs are. There is no secret you have uncovered.**

Bucky laughs as he pries up the access panel again to tinker around with the inner workings a little more.

“Tell me again?”

They flood their collective consciousness with mock irritability and genuine fondness and warmth, and then form their face to hover near Bucky’s and observe the work being done on the metal arm.

 **“I was in a rabbit,”** they start. 

“Gotta love those rabbits.”

 **“I do not got to love the rabbits.”** They lick Bucky’s cheek. **“It is you who I love. The very best host on this planet. And far better than hosts from other, more hospitable, planets have been.”**

“Flattered. So tell me about the rabbit, again?”

They watch as Bucky reaches for the littlest soldering iron and sends sparks flicking up with a wince. Most of the reconstruction can be done before attaching it, and they had had great fun handing him parts and holding things in place.

He is far better at assembling metal arms than he is with wooden furniture. Arms, yes. Cabinets, no.

It is only a shame that he cannot fully repair the arm without being able to feel what is still wrong with it and what needs adjustment. It is a burden they cannot help with because they are not allowed to. Scars and metal arms. Pride points, for some reason.

**“…I had tried to take one of the human hosts, before. A sentient host is the best option. But they fight and struggle. Try to stay separate. Try to chase us out.”**

“Skipping the rabbit? For shame.” Bucky closes up the panel and gives the metal arm another flex. “Hm. Getting there.”

**“You were not like the others. I fled the rabbit—there, I have mentioned the rabbit—”**

“You’re the best, love.”

**“I know. And I fled into you, thinking that you would take me out of the area after I fought and subdued you.”**

To think, that this host, their host, their Bucky might have struggled and resisted, might have been locked in an antagonistic battle with them all this time, or until his organs gave up and died. All the things they might have lost if it had been different.

“And I didn’t fight at all,” Bucky says with a laugh. “Come on in, this lot’s been vacant for years.”

 **“You did not fight,”** they agree. **“You wanted to be whole, and I filled all the empty places. And you filled my empty places. And we are together now.”**

They twine around Bucky and caress his shoulders, sending a tendril further down to rest on his thigh. **“You are mine and I am yours.”**

“Damn straight.” Bucky makes a minor adjustment with the tiniest of the already tiny screwdrivers. “Aughh-owww, okay, that fixed it. Damn.” 

The electric pulses as he flexes the metal arm feel no different from before from where they are observing inside and outside, but a sort of rightness accompanies the pulses as Bucky decides that what he feels indicates correct alignment. 

The metal fingers move smoothly and beautifully in a wave, soundless and bright in the lamplight.

**“Back in business?”**

“Back in business.” Bucky gives them a lingering kiss, caressing their cheek with the metal hand and its low hum of electricity that makes them shiver again. “Let’s go find ourselves a job.”

### BDSM: Big Damn Superhero Moment

######  **BUCKY:**

**— Suburbia, Upstate New York, USA: After school’s out, 09 September 1987 —**

And that’s the end Gerry Thompkins, down the hatch in one piece, not so much as a startled pigeon in the area to observe them.

Though there is a cat in the area making noise. Cat’s been there the whole time, but what’s a cat going to bother? 

**What is a pigeon going to bother?**

_Same as a cat— Not one thing._ So what if the cat saw things and then treed itself to avoid them. Not their problem.

They pick at their collective teeth with a single claw, pulling loose a bit of fabric and then swallowing it. Leave no trace behind. Works for hiking the trails _and_ killing the targets.

“Come on Mittsy! C’mere!”

**Child.**

_Not a snack._

**I was not suggesting it. The child did not see anything.**

Bucky shrugs off their merged form and and rolls his shoulders once more for good measure. _Even if the kid saw us gobble up the whole Thompkins family and not just our asshole swindler target, he wouldn’t be a snack._

“Mittsy! Mittsy! Here kitty!”

He’s not sure what the kid _would_ be, if he’d seen the whole thing. Other than traumatized, maybe. But not a snack. They’re not in the business of eating kids.

**…This seems like a reckless demarcation, for children to be never-snacks and not sometimes-snacks. What if a child is a target?**

_Then we don’t take the job, obviously._ Bucky makes his way around the Thompkins family home and gets a better look at Mittsy. _And we probably do the world a favor and take a bite out of the asshole trying to get a kid bumped off the planet._

Ugh. The cat is one of the ones with the nose like they ran into a brick wall at full speed. All scrunched up and better-than-thou. “Not so better now that you’re stuck up a tree, eh, kitty?”

Laughter, deep and booming, his favorite kind.

“Come down, Mittsy!” the boy pleads, nearly to the point of stomping his feet, like that will encourage the cat to comply. “Please?”

**You want the cat?**

What they ought to do is turn around, slip out the back gate and down the alley between houses, and head back home to write up their invoice. What they really shouldn’t do is get involved with rescuing this ugly snob cat.

“Sure, let’s get the cat. Put on a different face first, though.” The cool tingle of Venom disguising them washes over his face and scalp. _Thanks._

**No problem.**

“Hey kid,” he says cheerfully as he comes up to the fence. “You need help with that cat?”

“She won’t come down, but I’ve been calling her and calling her. She’s not supposed to be outside. I’m gonna get in trouble.”

Cute kid. Totally stupid to just go ahead and talk to some strange dude in a neighbor’s yard, but cute.

Bucky opens the gate and approaches the tree with the cat in it. He looks up and puts his hands on his hips. That’s what other, regular, people do when looking at problems—they put their hands on their hips and stare at it for a while. 

The cat predictably gets even more upset the closer he gets and the longer he stands there, in that way most animals seem to sense Venom and decide they want out of the area posthaste. 

_Who do we even look like right now? Someone who lives in this area? Is that why this kid is just totally fine with us showing up out of nowhere?_

**You look like Nikolas Hämäläinen. For old times’ sake.**

_Yeah, that’s not Mr Thompkins. Or anyone familiar to this kid._

**You did not specify.**

_True._

Well, if they look like a long-dead guy from Finland, why bother climbing the tree and fighting the cat? There are quicker, more efficient ways to get it down.

“Let me see if I can get her down,” Bucky says, placing his right palm against the tree trunk. “Might look weird, though. Don’t be scared.” 

_Do your thing, love. Gently._

Venom snakes a tentacle through his palm, around and up the tree trunk, and then out into a thin lacework net to snare the now-snarling cat. 

**Cat acquired. Just like old times.**

_Not quite like old times. This time_ you’re _the cage and there’s not a rabbit in sight._

**You and rabbits. From day one, rabbits.**

_You were_ in _a rabbit on day one, remember?_

He collects the cat from Venom’s cage by grabbing the scruff of its neck in his right hand and supporting its feet with his left. No sense in getting his skin shredded when he can limit the damage to his glove.

_We literally bonded over rabbits, love._

**Under them. You were on the floor by the time I got in.**

_Bonded under rabbits, bonded over rabbits… It’s all the same._

“Here you go, kid,” Bucky says as he presents the incredibly angry and equally terrified cat. “Safe and sound.”

The kid’s eyes are almost comically wide as he reaches for the cat. Some mixture of awe and excitement that Bucky can’t recall being directed at him in… well, ever. 

“Thanks, Mister! Wait’ll I tell everyone!” The kid runs off clutching that cat tight enough to pop it, but the cat is too petrified and too relieved to be moving away from them to make any attempt at escape. 

“Mom, Mom!” the kid yells on the way up the stairs. “I just met a superhero!”

The front door of the house slams behind him, and Bucky blinks. “We aren’t a superhero, are we?”

**Last time I checked… no. But things can change.**

_We kill people for money. By eating them alive. That hasn’t changed._

**But we also rescue cowardly cats with anger management issues.**

_Not sure that makes us a superhero, though._

**We have just had our first superhero moment. It felt good. The little one is so happy now. We did that.**

_…Yeah. That does feel pretty damn good._

**We should do this more. Have more superhero moments. Maybe bigger ones than cats. A big damn superhero moment. A BDSM.**

He’s pretty sure that stands for something else, but it’s probably best not to go there at this moment.

 _What, like strangle a purse-snatcher?_ That’d go real well for them. Some superhero moment that would be. The purse- _owner_ would be terrified of them, probably run off without the purse and that might make _them_ the purse-snatcher. 

Or worse if they try to run her down and hand it over.

**Maybe we chuck the purse at the purse-owner from a distance. It would be heroic if we do not eat the purse-snatcher, regardless.**

_I don’t know, love. Purse-snatcher’d still end up dead. Police report wouldn’t be kind to us._

**Break all of the bones in the purse-snatcher’s body? Tear off the purse-snatcher’s arms, so that he cannot snatch purses?**

Oh, man, this could go so wrong if he doesn’t head it off at the pass. _…How about we work on a strategy_ before _we go looking for purse-snatchers._ Well _before._

**And if we spot one first? Before we have planned how to be a superhero?**

_Well, let’s hope we’re really busy and he runs really fast._

Bucky takes another look around the yard and confirms that there are no traces left of them or their target. Another job complete, another invoice to serve, another vacation to take.

“Think we’re done here, V. Let’s head out.”

### Only Mostly Dead 

######  **BUCKY:**

**— Kingston, Jamaica: Afternoon, 04 May 2012 —**

Another job well done, another hotel room borrowed from the recently departed, another round of room service to enjoy… And at a fucking resort, no less. They should take hits on flighty businessmen more often.

‘Course they still have part two to do, but that should be just as fun and nutritious as the first one. And in the meantime, this place has an actual chocolate fountain on their room service menu, which they can’t very well not get at least once a day, right?

He sticks a fork in a piece of pineapple and dunks it under the curtain of chocolate a few times. So fucking good. 

**Eat a banana next.** They seem almost bored, which is a good thing after a meal like their last one. Nice and mellow.

“You got it, love,” he says around his bite. He swallows and spears a hunk of banana. “Wanna watch something? See if there’s a movie on, maybe?”

That piques their interest; Venom perks right up. **Porn?**

“I wasn’t thinking porn, no. I’ve got a fucking chocolate fountain. And a mound of fruit. There are kiwis, V, _kiwis_. My hands are too busy to jack off and no— I’m not asking for help.” He blinks. “Unless you want to come out here and eat some chocolate-covered fruit.”

**Porn later?**

“Yeah, m’kay. We’ll watch a porno later.” Bucky reaches for the remote and starts flipping through channels. “I’m going to find something else in the meantime. Maybe even just the n— What the _fuck?!_ ”

That’s _his city_ getting trashed like a war zone, even if he doesn’t live there. New fucking York! A war zone? When the fuck did _that_ happen? They haven’t even been out of the country a whole week.

He checks to make sure it’s a news station and not some H. G. Wells moment where the broadcast is too realistic to people just tuning in. Yep. News. Granted, the news lies, but… 

“Whoa,” he says as a pair of Halloween costumes zips through the sky above Manhattan. “ _Hello,_ ugly.”

There are explosions, and a newscaster breathlessly talking about monsters and something called Avengers, and then a building in the distance is toppled by a metallic, segmented space worm of some kind. 

“ _Lotta_ ugly,” he mutters. “V, get out here, take a look.” He watches another pair of gliders come out of some roiling ring in the sky, followed by several more, all piloted by a pair of Halloween costumes.

Venom shifts around a bit, but continues loafing in their post-kill satisfaction. It’s not porn and it’s not more food and the building isn’t on fire, so Bucky isn’t surprised by the response. Whatever the problem is, it’s well out of their reach, so no sense getting worked up needlessly when they can lounge around enjoying a job well done.

**If it is ugly, why do I need to see it?**

“These aren’t your friends from Klyntar coming to take over the planet, are they?”

 **I would not be friends with ugly hosts when I have you.**

Venom stirs a bit, taking a precursory look at the screen through his eyes. That seems to change their tone quite a bit.

 **Also, this is** **_my_ ** **planet, and the others cannot have it. I am not the loser here,** they say, vehemently. **_They_ ** **are.**

“Does that mean this is your team lead coming with a cavalry of hosts collected from the planet of ugly, or not?”

Venom forms their face and looks more closely at the screen with a wordless mutter. Then: **“They are not hosts. And I would sense my team lead coming. But we should be there. Destroying all these Chitauri roaches.”**

“Is that what they are? Chitauri?”

**“They are vermin.”**

“So, yes. Chitauri. Hey!” Bucky points at the screen as a flash of green appears. “It’s the Other Guy!”

Venom’s head does a happy little bob on their twined neck strands. **“He looks very well. Healthy. And so angry.”**

Bucky laughs in disbelief as the Other Guy single-fistedly stops a metal space worm in its tracks. “Holy shit, V. He figured it out. Maybe they made nice, after all.”

**“Look at him smash. So vibrant a green and no sickly tinge. They look so happily angry together.”**

“Well, he’s not in hiding any _more._ Damn. Last time he was up that way he broke Harlem. Now look at him. All that control.”

 **“The Pal!”** Venom drags him up out of his chair and right in front of the screen. **“Look, it is the Pal!”**

“Fucking…” Bucky breathes, staring at the screen, his thoughts moving so fast even he can’t figure out what he’s thinking _or_ seeing. “Steve…”

**“He is not dead. The museum lied to you. And the google.”**

“It’s just google…” he says, but his heart and his attention aren’t in it. Steve. Steve Rogers. His Stevie, his pal, his… Well never mind what he _was_ , he’s alive right now, and right there in New York City with his glorious gaudy outfit clinging to his every curve.

Fighting aliens. Because the first thing that punk would do when crawling out of the shadows is fight a fucking alien army, that’s why.

“We gotta get up there. Right after this second hit.” He reaches out to trace the screen where Steve is launching the Widow skyward on his shield. “We’ll move the hit up. Get some tickets. Pack and shit now, grab a quick meal, send our invoice from a plane.”

**“We do not have to get tickets and wait for a plane when we can swim.”**

“We’re not swimming for hundreds of miles. New York’s hella far away, love.”

**“But the Pal.”**

“Yeah, I know. We’ll find him.” He watches until the footage cuts from Steve to the rich guy with the robot suit, and then shuts off the TV. The more time spent watching, the less time spent getting there, and they’ve got shit to wrap up here.

**“Our second target. The banker.”**

“Right.” Bucky eyes the chocolate fountain sadly and jams half a kiwi in his mouth. _Lotta people in New York,_ he thinks, _and it’s chaos right now, but we’ll find him._

He swallows. “We’ll find Steve. I’m not fucking losing him again.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, that's it for this story. Wow, it's been a lot of fun and I'll really miss this! There are sequels in planning and writing stages, and the series will both fill some gaps in the timeline (this fic skips and skims several years, after all) and some getting back together with Steve and joining the Avengers. We'll get to see more of Bucky and Venom, learn how they know the Hulk, and find out what Steve's opinion is of his best buddy's extraterrestrial life partner. ^_^ I'm looking forward to it, and I hope you are as well!
> 
> What all are you hoping to see in the sequels?

**Author's Note:**

> Come find me on [Tumblr!](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/view/flamingo-queen-writes)


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